Skift India Daily: India Must Cut Back on Business Travel to Reduce Emissions
25.08.2023 - 13:57
/ skift.com
/ Amrita Ghosh
Indian companies have failed to set targets to reduce corporate travel emissions, according to an annual report by campaign group Transport & Environment. Globally, only 50 companies out of 322 have set targets to reduce business travel, with information technology (IT) services company Wipro paving the way in India. Wipro has achieved a 15-20 percent reduction in air travel emissions between the 2015 and 2020 period. Among all 10 Indian companies featured in the ranking report, only IT services provider Tech Mahindra reports on air travel emissions specifically. “Advancements taking place in India are mostly being led by the technology industry. We invite these technology companies to continue to work on their travel policies and demonstrate leadership to catalyze change in other industries,” said Denise Auclair, corporate travel manager at Transport & Environment. Of the companies that have targets, only four companies meet the “gold standard” of reporting air travel emissions and commitment to reducing them by 50 percent or more, by 2025 or sooner. These are Novo Nordisk (pharmaceuticals, Denmark), Swiss Re (finance, Switzerland), Fidelity International (finance, Britain) and ABN Amro (finance, the Netherlands).
Air India has announced a partnership with cloud-based software company Salesforce in a bid to transform customer experience. The deployment of Salesforce will allow Air India to track customer interactions across its contact center, mobile, web, chatbot, email, social media and other channels to provide a single source-of-truth of customer requests and issues, the airline said in a release. Additionally, it will give Air India’s customer-facing staff and its automated systems the ability to act on challenges proactively and track them to closure, assisted by artificial intelligence-induced technology.
Kolkata railway station will now also house a Bangladesh visa information center to guide visitors on the visa processing procedure. A sizeable population of the east Indian state of West Bengal has a strong connection with Bangladesh as thousands of Bangladeshi refugees are settled across the state. The center will be operated by DUDigital, a visa processing company, which already operates other Bangladesh visa application centers in Kolkata and Siliguri. The centers will provide a variety of services, including visa application form filing, a photo booth, passport collection and delivery. Kolkata railway station is the terminal point for two Bangladesh-bound trains — Maitree Express, which runs till the capital city Dhaka, and the Bandhan Express that goes to Khulna.
Flight operations have resumed at the Pakyong airport in India’s first fully-organic state of Sikkim. A SpiceJet plane landed