BR Initiatives

Green Initiatives

As one of the country’s leading financial institutions, we, at Kotak Mahindra, know we have a big role in promoting environmental sustainability.
And so, our approach towards the issue is two-pronged. Through our lending and investment decisions, we support the adoption of environmentally-sustainable
technologies and processes. We also focus on reducing our own carbon footprint.We encourage our customers to choose e-statements for their credit cards.
This reduces the wastage of paper, while also allowing them to store and retrieve statements electronically, at their convenience.
As a token of appreciation for every customer who opts for an e-credit card statement, we plant a sapling in partnership with Grow-Trees.com.

We also strictly adhere to the RBI's mandate on negative screening list for investments. And also check for all relevant environmental clearances as part of
our project appraisal process, before making any lending decisions. Along with this, we have established a Social Environmental Management System Plan
(SEMSP) to evaluate the social and environmental risks of eligible borrowers for IFC Line of Credit. SEMSP guides the credit risk assessment team to evaluate the
social and environmental risks as part of overall credit risk assessment.

As a bank, we have limited material environmental impact, and hence we focus primarily on building energy efficiency, data center efficiency and resource (paper)
optimisation as part of our green agenda internally. Since data centers are one of the largest energy consumers, we have optimised ours into a single facility in 2009,
to leverage system efficiencies and exercise better control on their energy performance. Initiatives such as high and medium density server rooms, server virtualisation,
server consolidation, cold aisle containment and managing optimal levels of inlet temperature have yielded good results. They have also reduced the energy
intensity of our data centre and contributed towards environmental sustainability.

We focus on improving our office efficiency, so as to consume fewer resources and save more energy. Our two corporate offices - Kotak Infiniti, Malad (East) and
27BKC - have the maximum employee footprint. And so, we have incorporated green building features while constructing these, at the design stage itself. The Kotak Infiniti
office has occupancy and day-light sensors, energy-efficient chillers and CFL lighting solutions to reduce energy demand. Further, we have made conscious efforts to
switch to energy- efficient LED lighting through a phase-wise replacement of CFL lighting. Being a green building, the 27BKC office is pre-certified for
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver rating and is expected to get the final certification soon.

We have also cut down on the fresh water intake for both office premises, by recycling wastewater and reusing this treated water for toilet flushing and gardening.
This is supplemented by efforts to harvest rainwater through collection tanks in both offices, and ground water recharge at our BKC office.
Furthermore, kitchen waste generated in these offices is donated to a trust which composts it to use as manure.