Not All Changes Are Good Changes | Ashwin Kak, Intellecap

Sure. I think you’ve summarised it well, but for the purpose of this podcast and its intended audience, I’ll take a step back and look at my career.

I’ve been working for 14 years now, nine of them mostly in sustainable development and CSR, or what I like to call corporate responsibility. These are the roles I’ve held at Pidilite and now at AB InBev.

The projects I’ve been part of range from education, skilling and women’s entrepreneurship development on the CSR side, to very specific sustainability projects around climate action, agriculture and water stewardship.

It has been an interesting roller coaster ride. Partnerships have always been at the centre of the impact we’ve tried to achieve across my different roles. So that’s been my journey.

How I began is quite interesting. This was back in 2014 and 2015, which serendipitously was also the time the SDGs were being launched.

I had been selling and marketing Fevicol across India for around five years, deeply entrenched in the commercial side of the business. But in 2015 I started wondering how I, as an individual, could create a larger impact while staying in the corporate setup.

It was an interesting time, because Pidilite was setting up its CSR foundation team, and I became part of that team. We started from scratch, with about five to ten people, and gradually built up the entire initiative.

My transition from the commercial side to the CSR side involved a lot of hands on, on the job learning, and learning from experts in the field. It was literally restarting my education and skilling journey.

I took a lot of courses and certifications, learning what I would call micro skills in sustainability. That’s how the transition really happened.

To begin with, it was a lot of self learning. But very soon I realised the importance of having the right mentor.

We had a very nice team. The people who had dotted line reporting to me, who were considered a level below in the corporate sense, actually ended up being much better mentors for me in many ways.

Two of them, Mahendra Bhai and Ajit Bhai, were heading the foundations when we were setting up the foundation team. They had over two decades of experience at that time, and they were my first mentors in the larger development space.

As you get into the domain, you don’t just interact internally but with many external partners. You go to industry events, get exposed to the ecosystem and look for external guides and mentors. That pool really expanded for me. Today I have at least a dozen guides or mentors I reach out to whenever I’m confused about something.

I think for any student, practitioner or individual starting off in this space, the more humble they are and the more willing to learn and unlearn, the more it will help them. This is crucial in this profession.

This is an interesting term. I got very interested in it a few years back, when there was a lot of talk about the circular economy.

The more I probed and looked for academic literature, practitioner perspectives or research, the best text I found was a book literally called Cradle to Cradle, by Michael Braungart and William McDonough. It’s a brilliant book. The authors have also written another great book called The Upcycle.

When I was reading it, it was an eye opener in many ways. Let me take a step back to explain what it is.

When you think of the pre circular economy ideas of how businesses should run, you often think of the cradle to grave approach. That’s the traditional way of doing business, from extracting raw materials to waste disposal.

In the product industry, for example, you have raw material extraction, processing, refining and the intermediary steps, final product manufacturing, and transportation of both input materials and the finished product. Then you have product use and disposal.

What cradle to cradle does as a concept is view this process as a continuous loop that never stops. How does that happen? You start by examining the materials and components you use. Can they be repurposed or recycled? You look at the product from a life cycle perspective.

For a company, this means you don’t see a product only as something created and sold to the market. You also consider how it will return, get recycled or get upcycled. This change in perspective can completely transform how you think about running a business.

When we started brainstorming within my team at AB InBev, we began to shift our focus from just recycling to upcycling. It’s a subtle but significant difference.

We began thinking about design as well, because in this context design takes precedence. If your product cannot come apart into pieces that can be recycled, returned or reused, then cradle to cradle doesn’t make sense.

We became much better sustainability professionals by not thinking in silos. We started asking the right questions of the new product development team, the design team and the logistics team. It’s a comprehensive way of thinking.

The two scientists and authors who developed this concept also have their own cradle to cradle certification. But before getting into certifications, we need to change our mindset. That’s what cradle to cradle is about.

The best example is from when we re-evaluated our entire supply chain and realised that some elements of this concept were already in practice, and we hadn’t realised it.

For a beer company in India, most SKUs are sold in glass bottles, not cans. Cans are sold more in Western countries, or even in Vietnam. India is still very much a glass bottle market.

When we realised the potential of a glass bottle being returned six or eight times, or having a very high recycled content, it was like a gold mine. We had always looked at it from a strictly commercial or operational perspective. More returned bottles meant cost savings, because fewer new bottles needed to be made.

But from a carbon emissions perspective, every time a glass bottle is returned instead of a new one being made, you save anywhere between 80 and 95% of the carbon emissions of that bottle.

Because when you return a glass bottle, what do you have to do? You just have to wash it.

There is nothing else. No manufacturing, processing or refining. So that in itself becomes a very good cradle to cradle concept. I wouldn’t say it’s the perfect example, because a lot can be improved in the materials used, for example.

But for us as a sustainability team, it became a crucial way to embed ourselves into what we call the reverse logistics system of our product.

Sometimes the whole idea of sustainability and cradle to cradle is already built into old systems, like glass bottles, one of the oldest forms of packaging. Having a modern ideology helps you realise that not all changes are good changes. Sometimes it’s good to recognise that what you’re doing is already correct, and to stay with it.

That’s an interesting question. One thing we need to differentiate is that cities usually refer to the bigger urban areas, while urban areas can include smaller towns. What sustainability means in a city like Bangalore differs from Pune, which differs from Bhopal. That perspective is very important.

From a policy or institutional perspective, there’s a lot of government involvement and a role for corporates. However, our cities and urban areas have a weak and fragmented institutional architecture.

There are multiple parastatal agencies working under different bosses and departments, pulling their own strings. This creates overlapping responsibilities and challenges.

For example, urban development authorities build infrastructure, while public corporations provide water, electricity and transport. In this challenging situation, there are a few areas where corporates can make an impact, especially in building green cities from the ground up.

Of all the carbon emissions in urban areas, somewhere around 30 to 45% comes from the real estate sector, from construction and buildings. It’s not the vehicles or industries, it’s the buildings that contribute significantly.

So the real estate sector has a big role in managing the embodied carbon in construction materials and in designing sustainable buildings.

From my own experience, after COVID we revamped our central head office in Bangalore. It spans 60,000 square feet, but the building’s windows didn’t open. Bangalore has a good breeze for eight to nine months of the year, but without windows that open, we had to keep the AC on all the time. That’s a design flaw.

We also considered installing solar panels, but the roof wasn’t designed to support them. Roadblocks like these show the need for better design and planning from the start.

The real estate sector and corporates can push each other to ask the right questions, and make sustainability a criterion when evaluating spaces to lease. It’s a collective effort of builders and tenants.

These are a few points where I think corporates can play a huge role, other than, of course, actively taking part in a lot of civic initiatives. Structurally, this is the top area for me.

Since you mentioned rainwater harvesting, recently in Bangalore, during the water crisis, we weren’t getting enough water. In the society where I live, we started asking each other, do we have a rainwater harvesting system here?

Many of us had been living there for years, and only realised we didn’t have one when the water stopped. That’s despite Bangalore being one of the progressive cities where there is a proper regulation for it.

Those are interesting times, when you realise this. And you would think corporates are educated people. This is where sustainability knowledge and proper awareness are very important. With a changing world and changing global challenges, what we know should also change with time.

When we talk about the innovation economy, I’ll stick to the example of Bangalore here, because it will help us explain.

There are problems here, but there are also solutions here. When you ask about the innovation economy, Bangalore is also a startup hub. So there are many avenues for collaboration among startups, corporates and the government.

For example, Bangalore is a lake based city, not one of the bigger cities on a riverbank. It has many man made lakes from centuries ago that sustain its water requirements.

These lakes were very intelligently designed, with connecting rajakaluves, channels that take water from one lake to another. When the rajakaluves were active, there was never flooding, because it was all an interconnected system. If the water level went up in one lake, the rajakaluves took the water somewhere else.

Learning from this innovation from our past, there are so many things we could do. The rajakaluves have become drains today. Some citizen groups are thinking about creating cycling paths on top of them, since they spread across and connect the whole city. That could solve transport issues without creating new paths.

We’ve also worked with startups on solutions like extracting drinking water from moisture in the air, which has progressed significantly in recent years. Innovations like these can address major issues without relying on expensive options like water tanker mafias, which create problems in summer.

Another innovation is hydroponics for growing vegetables and horticultural crops. I’ve connected with people who left corporate jobs to explore hydroponics commercially. Bangalore’s innovation culture provides the right network and supporting infrastructure.

Bangalore could become a hub for urban sustainability innovation. The city gets enough rain to sustain itself, but poor water harvesting means we don’t capitalise on it. It’s not rocket science. Proper harvesting is key.

The 73rd and 74th amendments, if I remember correctly from the early 1990s, enabled a third layer in our governance. They allowed the creation of urban local bodies and granted them significant power.

However, there is a debate about how much power these amendments really give municipalities. There is a difference between the spirit of the amendments and how they are implemented.

How many of us remember the mayors of our cities? A lot of us, if we search on Google, will realise we haven’t had a mayor for years, even decades. That indicates a challenge in the authority, accountability and power given to municipalities, mayors and local bodies.

A lot needs to change there, but that’s a larger policy discussion. I recently debated this in a public policy course.

There’s a quote that says everyone wants power devolved or delegated down to a certain level, until it reaches them. So it depends on which part of the hierarchy you are in. I’ll leave the audience with that thought.

Now, the second part of your question, how corporates engage and create impact.

Corporates can engage in meaningful ways rather than with superficial activities. For instance, they can add value to existing initiatives. In Bangalore, there’s a private and public initiative where everyone from WRI India to Janaagraha to B.PAC is involved, along with the government.

Corporates can drive conversations around these campaigns with their employees. That’s low hanging fruit. Using public infrastructure, which is often underused, is another area where corporates can make a difference, like the idea of turning the channels that link the lakes into cycling paths. Of course, safety concerns must be addressed, but it’s an innovative idea.

Corporates should also implement and benchmark their own sustainability policies, and encourage employees to follow them. We’re running a campaign on urban mobility for corporates focused on this.

Corporates need to recognise the structural challenges in governance, but they should not use them as an excuse to do nothing. These are a few areas where corporates can make a significant impact.

I’ll start with the failures, because I’ve learned the most from them. Spent grain, a byproduct of brewing, is often sold at throwaway rates. We started an initiative in southern India, working with communities to use spent grain as cattle fodder to increase milk productivity.

It worked well in Telangana, so we thought it was replicable and tried to expand it. The biggest failure was around our plants near Sonipat. We kept pitching it to the community and wondered why people weren’t accepting it.

When we got down to the bare bone numbers, we realised that milk productivity in a state like Haryana is already very high, so spent grain wouldn’t change much. This initiative might not work in Haryana, or Punjab by extension.

That was a big learning. In the policy space we call it isomorphic mimicry, when we take best practices from elsewhere and try to replicate them completely without understanding the local context. And this wasn’t even global to India. It was one urban area in India to another.

In terms of successes, one notable project was installing a drinking water unit on the fringes of the Bangalore municipality with AB InBev. This self sustaining model involved creating the infrastructure, training people, and then having the community run it.

It was successful because it didn’t need perpetual corporate involvement, which allowed us to focus on other areas.

Another success was a wide scale skilling project during my time at Pidilite, in partnership with the government of Gujarat, back in 2015, with the industrial training institutes. We worked on skilling people in trades such as carpentry. It succeeded because of strong government support and a well structured programme.

This was different in many ways. These ITIs delivered over 20 skills. Pidilite was a knowledge partner with the government of Gujarat on skilling in general.

But it also brought its own specialised skills in carpentry, plumbing and electrical work, because those were industries it sold its products into. So this wasn’t just a corporate trying to skill everyone in general. It was a corporate with a very good understanding of specific skills in certain industries, which it could bring to young people trying to upskill themselves.

And it could employ them back, as they were its customers. At that time Pidilite had also started what was called the Sati programme. When I was an area sales manager in the Pune branch, we piloted it there. It was a loyalty programme for carpenters and contractors, something no other company had done.

In the last 15 years it has grown to have lakhs and lakhs of carpenters and contractors registered. Those experiences gave Pidilite the confidence to enter such a partnership with the state, because the company had its ear to the ground. It could hear the needs, wants and desires of that community.

The government of Gujarat’s skilling department was also very positive. They never approached it as just their problem or their solution. It wasn’t just a funding partnership. It was a strong, co-created knowledge partnership, and that’s why it worked.

Everything we talked about could not have been possible without an on the ground partner. As corporates, we always had a very strong implementation partner.

One of the most satisfying campaigns for me personally was the Save the Beach campaign on Juhu Beach. It ran for around one and a half years, and well meaning people from in and around Juhu gathered once every week.

That wouldn’t have been possible if it had been run only by a corporate that isn’t even headquartered in Bombay. We had a partner like Earth Day Network, and engagement from the municipality during the launch. This was around World Environment Day 2018, if I remember right, when India was the host country.

We started with a small group of eight or nine partners, but it gained such momentum that by the end of the campaign more than 100 local civic bodies and citizen groups had joined.

We always knew that week on week beach clean ups wouldn’t be a permanent solution. But when you do it for some time, you raise enough civic awareness for people to start asking the right questions. Every week, we trained people to go back and ask why the beach was getting polluted in the first place, and where all this waste was coming from.

The other initiative is the urban mobility campaign for corporates in Bangalore, which has just been restarted. It was the brainchild of organisations from very different setups.

There was a recently formed real estate industry body, the Bangalore Political Action Committee, the Indian Institute of Science Sustainable Transportation Lab, where Professor Ashish Verma brought his lived practitioner and research perspective, and the ICT Forum for Sustainable Cities. Everyone had their own expertise.

The campaign created an extensive questionnaire to evaluate how corporates encourage urban mobility and a better commute for their own employees. It aims to reward the best practices and create an urban mobility toolkit for corporates by the end of the year.

Yes, the documentation will be available at the end of the campaign. Right now the team is reaching out to corporates, learning their best practices and getting them to fill in self assessment forms.

Once it’s ready, we would love to publish it, because it’s a unique experiment in India. Experiments like this have been done in European cities like Copenhagen.

It’s a very ambitious attempt at a manifesto for zero slums in India. A lot of it has to do with livability in cities, how cities can be healthier and expand without too much stress on the existing population.

When I asked myself those questions, the slums that have mushroomed across our cities kept coming up.

There is a lot of literature, research and action on slum rehabilitation and resettlement, and on redesigning existing slums. But none of these really solve why slums come up in the first place.

Through this research, I aimed to understand the best practices globally and learn from India’s context. There are issues like high migration, poverty, income inequality, and a lack of public services and infrastructure.

Three top solutions in the manifesto are developing regional hubs instead of just smart cities, considering urban employment schemes similar to NREGA, and reforming land management policies, like the floor space index, to manage urban density better.

Mixed neighbourhoods, where high income areas support low income ones, can also help. These solutions have worked globally and need to be implemented in India.

Corporates can play a vital role, especially in public service and infrastructure delivery. Industry apprenticeships for skilling, like Pidilite’s partnership with the government of Gujarat, are crucial. Corporates will also play a key role in housing neighbourhoods and urban development.

One thing is covered brilliantly in Devashish Dhar’s book, India’s Blind Spot, about our cities. It discusses how India can benefit from a night economy, like in Bombay. Using public infrastructure at night can add value without straining resources.

We don’t need to develop the entire city for a night economy, just specific clusters to make the most of public infrastructure. Hospitals operate 24/7, for example. Buildings like schools and colleges could be used at night. It’s about finding the right balance.

Sustainability is dynamic, and professionals need to embrace this fluidity. Young professionals often feel shaken by the lack of consistency, but it’s essential to see it as an opportunity for more efficient and better solutions.

Hands on experience, learning and failing are crucial. The gap between research and practice must be reduced.

Sustainability professionals need to understand the business, technology and policy aspects of sustainability. They should be generalists who can navigate these verticals.

I have a take on this which might disappoint a lot of my colleagues. When you talk about HR, we need to understand that this has been happening in a lot of Indian companies ever since the CSR law came in 2014.

Many companies that were pioneers didn’t really face a problem, because they already had teams doing sustainability. They had to restructure and put a team together. Others, who were late to the bus, started turning their HR teams into, for example, their CSR teams.

I would say that’s a very risky slope to be on, because these aren’t easily transferable skills. People think CSR is about being empathetic and understanding the community, so HR will connect with it really well.

But those are not easy things to navigate. HR works within the organisation, while CSR has a lot of the dynamics of the external world, which HR has never been exposed to. So the HR piece is troubling to me.

What I can understand is when legal and compliance professionals move into ESG. I’m using different terms on purpose, because ESG is a lot about risk mitigation and compliance reporting, where a compliance professional fits in really well.

For sustainability, I won’t constrain where people can come from, because I have seen people from different domains fit in. But they need to start learning the technical and policy aspects. It’s less about which function leads more seamlessly to which, and more about the individual. But this HR thing is very risky.

Indian companies should stop seamlessly moving HR teams into CSR teams. That’s my take.

Thank you, Saurabh. This is a great series of podcasts, and a great set of ideas you have around it. My best wishes. I think there will be a lot more master classes and experts coming in to share their views, and I’m looking forward to seeing this grow.