Greenpeace today unveiled an economic and environmental roadmap for implementation of the progressive Green Telecom Directive issued by the Department of Telecom, Government of India through its report “Enabling Clean Talking”.
The report emphasizes that if the Green Telecom Directive is implemented effectively on ground, with mandatory compliance clauses within, it can help save the Indian telecom sector over Rs 2430 crore on its annual energy expenditure, apart from a saving of over INR 380 crore to the state exchequer.
It also suggests simplifying some of the clauses related to carbon emission disclosures and synchronising it with the global standards along with providing fiscal support to the telecom sector for incentivising clean energy transition.
Some of the key findings in terms of implication of the DoT directive from the report include:
Enforcement of the DoT directive would save more than 540 million litres of diesel on an average annually, and about 3.5 billion litres of diesel, cumulatively, by 2015.
The cost and energy savings in terms of revenue expenditure from this will be at minimum of INR 2430 crore annually.
About 9 million tons of carbon emission could be saved in just over 3 years’ time.
The alternate approach of the report suggests:
The first step is to eliminate diesel consumption in rural and semi-urban areas. 70 per cent of India’s towers are in these areas.
With an ambition to be diesel free by 2020, 12.5 per cent of these towers need to be retrofitted every year resulting in the entire 100 per cent of the towers going diesel-free within 8 years.
For the telecom companies average savings would be INR 10,000 crore every year that adds up to nearly INR 80,000 crore over the 8 year period.
