What India’s sustainability movement needs now is less performance and more precision.
Every June, as World Environment Day arrives with its hashtags and pledges, a quieter question lingers large: who is actually doing the work?
Namrata Nulwalla, Chief Sustainability Officer at Rustomjee Group, is one of those rare practitioners who has operated on both sides of the sustainability equation, as an assessor who verifies what companies claim, and as an executive who must deliver on those claims herself. Her perspective is less of evangelism, and more engineering.
Nulwalla has worked across manufacturing, real estate, and services, and she is clear-eyed about the uneven terrain. The manufacturing sector in India, she notes, began its sustainability journey in the mid-1990s, driven by the carbon-intensive demands of cement, steel, chemicals, and power. Real estate, by contrast, only gained serious traction around 2010. The technical challenges differ across industries, but the human obstacle is always the same: acceptance of change is always difficult.
That friction matters because the ambitions being announced are significant. Net zero targets have multiplied across Indian boardrooms, yet few have been mapped with credibility. Nulwalla is frank about why: net zero is a largely misunderstood and loosely used term. The first step, she argues, is definitional clarity. Is the goal net zero energy? Water? Waste? Carbon? Each demands a fundamentally different approach.
Once that is settled, the logic of a credible roadmap becomes cleaner. Start your reductions at source, she advises, so generate less and conserve more, through the use of technology, conservation methodology, and a focus on building materials that are sourced sustainably and locally. Low carbon content, higher recycled components in raw material, efficient processing: these are the levers. Offsetting, she insists, should be the last resort, used only for residual carbon that cannot be reduced any further at the source. In an era when carbon credits have become something of a reputational crutch, that sequencing matters enormously.
Reporting, too, is an arena where style frequently outpaces substance. For companies facing the alphabet soup of GRI, CDP, GRESB, and BRSR, the temptation is to navigate by acronym rather than by evidence.
Nulwalla’s prescription is blunt: start collecting data along with supporting evidence. That is the only way to report correctly, ethically, and transparently. Every initiative taken and every detail matters. She advocates for cross-functional change agents, people embedded in each department who understand the nuances of each standard, ensure awareness, and provide training. Systems, not gestures.
Her internal approach at Rustomjee reflects this rigour. She employs a maker-checker system, where site engineers enter data into a reporting portal, and every data point is backed up with primary and secondary evidence. The goal, she explains, is to replicate the standard that external verification demands, without waiting for external verification to impose it. If an external assessor verifies the data, the chance of misrepresentation is largely reduced. Her team has decided not to wait for that external check to create the discipline.
On the topic of a circular economy, a term that has become perhaps the most casually invoked in sustainability discourse, Nulwalla offers a grounding observation. The concept is not new to Indian households, she points out. Glass and plastic jars get reused for storage. Newspapers go to recyclers. Used clothes are donated. Outgrown books find new readers. Unfortunately, she notes, we have started aping the western culture and ignored some of these good old habits.
In the construction context, that philosophy translates into how waste is managed and controlled on site. Fly ash, GGBS, and gypsum find their way back into cement and ready-mix concrete, reducing the percentage of virgin raw material and, consequently, the CO2 content of the building across its lifecycle. Treated and recycled wastewater becomes a reusable resource rather than a disposal problem. But Nulwalla flags a gap that is often overlooked: developers tend to be conscientious about the sustainability of the homes they sell, and less so about the water tankers and labour camp infrastructure that enabled construction in the first place. The bigger concern, she notes, is not materials that can return to the economy, but those that cannot.
What emerges from a conversation with Nulwalla is not a manifesto but a methodology. India’s sustainability movement has grown fast enough to generate impressive announcements and now faces the harder task of generating impressive outcomes. The gap between the two will not be closed by pledges or frameworks alone. It will be closed by the unglamorous work of data collection, internal accountability, honest sequencing, and systems that hold. On World Environment Day, that may be the most important thing worth saying.
Namrata Nulwalla is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Rustomjee Group and a certified GRI assessor.
