One such drastic step is going to come from Infosys, India’s leading IT company, who is aiming at its employee who do not tune in there behavior to green culture of the company.

“At Infosys we took decision to improve energy efficiency up to 10 times through disruptive designs. During our study for energy consumption, we found that many people in the company don’t switch off their computer even when they are not working on it," Rohin Parikh, head, Green Initiatives, Infosys, while speaking at Green Business Summit 2010 where industry experts discussed various steps being taken in the corporate world for addressing the issue of global warming.

He further added that they have power-plug installed at the company’s premise that act as guard for this. In case a computer is idle for some time, an SMS is send to the person who uses that system to switch off the machine. This is to bring change in their behavior.

Parikh further mentioned the company is planning to penalize in case employees defy the SMS alerts.

“If they don’t do it even after getting SMS alerts, we are going to debit their leaves,” added Parikh.

He mentioned that Infosys hires around 30 to 35 thousand employees annually and has worked to provide green working environment to them.

“Since we had the challenge of increasing energy efficiency by 10 folds, we had to question every established concept. During our study we found that about 45 to 50 per cent power is consumed in air-conditioning, 35 to 40 per cent goes into computers and data centers and 15 per cent is spent in lighting,” elaborated Parikh.

At the summit, speakers not only discussed contributions that IT can make in reducing carbon emission but also introspected the ways in which the IT industry that contributes two per cent to the global carbon emission can help reduce the emission.

“Carbon emission from ICT, which was about two per cent in 2007, is likely to rise rapidly to about three per cent of all emissions by 2020. That sounds small but in 2020 it will be twice of what the UK produces today,” said Prasanto Kumar Roy, president and chief editor, ICT group, CyberMedia.

Roy cited a report in Boccaletti et al which states that ICT can help to eliminate far more emissions in the general economy than their own production. It can abate about 15 per cent of the global emissions of today's time which stand at around 7.8 gigatons.

This report further elaborated about the potential abatement opportunities in areas like buildings where it can reduce up to 1.68 gt, managing power can result in 2.03 gt, for transport it comes to 1.52 gt and manufacturing it is 0.68 gt and there is scope of 0.5 gt carbon reduction across sectors such as telecommuting, digitization of content and so on.

Roy mentioned that a research on green IT, energy efficiency, and profits in organizations found that commitment of top management team matters for green IT adoption in an organization. This in turn drives spending on green IT within an organization as a percentage of IT spending.

“In our research we also found that organizations with high top management commitment and Green IT spending, report higher reductions in IT equipment energy consumption. Also, organizations with higher spending on green IT, report higher profit impact due to green IT,” said Roy.

Roy added that policymakers and regulators should demand disclosure of green IT in a way it happened for Y2K and is done in case of tax policy and rebates.

Roy’s views were supported by Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Honda at the event.

“There are no formal mandates for implementing IT for green or what people call Green IT. This absence of mandate is many times a good excuse for not implementing greener solution,” said Sethi.

Sethi mentioned that by digitalizing Good Life, a CRM booklet, Hero Honda estimates to have saved 2000 trees approximately in nine months time.

Lakshminarasimhan Srinivasan, head, eco-sustainability unit, TCS, added that Green IT should be made an integral part of organization’s value chain.

“Emission reduction has to be looked at across value chain. Revenue that we generate is to help our customers reduce carbon emission. We should include concept of green while delivering solutions to them,” said Srinivasan.