Every year, large companies publish ESG reports filled with percentages — renewable energy share, waste diverted, emissions avoided. What’s harder to find is the actual infrastructure sitting underneath those percentages: the pipes, wells, sensors, and treatment plants that make the numbers real. Infosys’ ESG Report 2025-26 is unusually generous with that detail, particularly when it comes to water and waste — two areas that rarely get the spotlight reserved for carbon and AI in most corporate sustainability disclosures.
- A 50% Cut in Water Intensity, Tracked Since 2008
- 405 Deep Injection Wells and 40 Artificial Lakes
- The Mangaluru Problem: Building Water Infrastructure on Bad Terrain
- Reviving a Dead Lake in Bengaluru
- Certified “Water Positive” — Using a Government Framework, Not a Private One
- Waste: A 5R Framework and a 99% Diversion Claim
- Why the Infrastructure Detail Matters More Than the Percentages
Read closely, the water and waste sections of the 162-page report describe a company that has spent nearly two decades quietly building physical infrastructure most outsiders never see: groundwater recharge networks, artificial lakes engineered for storage rather than scenery, and waste segregation systems designed around a five-step hierarchy rather than a simple recycling bin.
A 50% Cut in Water Intensity, Tracked Since 2008
Infosys‘ sustainability journey, as laid out in the report’s own timeline, didn’t start with a flashy pledge — it started in 2008 with something as modest-sounding as setting up a “Green Initiatives team.” From that starting point, the company says it achieved a 50% reduction in both energy and water intensity by 2017, against the 2008 baseline, years before “climate positive” entered its vocabulary. That long runway matters: the infrastructure described in this year’s report isn’t a sudden response to ESG reporting pressure, but the accumulated result of a near 20-year program.
This year’s report frames the next phase of that journey as a shift from “net zero” to “climate positive” by 2030 — built on two pathways the company calls Reduce and Restore, applied to both emissions and water. The water side of that pathway is where some of the report’s most concrete engineering detail shows up.
405 Deep Injection Wells and 40 Artificial Lakes
Rainwater harvesting at most companies means a few collection tanks. At Infosys, according to the report, it means a deliberately engineered groundwater recharge system: 405 deep injection wells installed strategically across Indian campuses, with a combined recharge capacity exceeding 20 million litres a day, alongside 40 artificial lakes built with a combined holding capacity of 430 million litres.
The framing is specific — these lakes are described as “active recharge systems,” not simply ornamental water bodies or stormwater basins. As of FY26, the company says 31.1 lakh square feet of rooftop area has been enabled for rainwater harvesting, or 52% of total rooftop area with harvesting potential — with the captured rainwater going through filtration before reuse rather than being discharged.
The report also documents rainwater collection volumes climbing steadily: from 2,62,900 kilolitres in FY24 to 2,77,900 kilolitres in FY25 and 2,81,600 kilolitres in FY26 — a slow but consistent increase that suggests the harvesting infrastructure is being incrementally expanded rather than installed all at once.
The Mangaluru Problem: Building Water Infrastructure on Bad Terrain
One of the more specific case studies in the report concerns the company’s Mangaluru Development Center, which sits on terrain the report describes as having low natural water-retention capacity — not an ideal site for a water-conscious campus. Rather than treating that as a constraint to work around, Infosys says it built water bodies, recharge structures, and green cover directly into the site, improving local groundwater recharge and, notably, supporting nearby agricultural activity outside the campus boundary.
It’s a small example, but a telling one: the report frames water stewardship as extending past the company’s own property line into the surrounding community’s water table — a framing that recurs in the report’s coverage of lake rejuvenation projects elsewhere in India.
Reviving a Dead Lake in Bengaluru
The report’s most visual water story is the rejuvenation of Doddathoguru Lake in Bengaluru, reopened on November 7, 2025, after being restored from what the report describes as a degraded state into what it calls a thriving ecosystem. It’s one of several lake rejuvenation projects Infosys has run over the past three years in partnership with local stakeholders across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Odisha.
The cumulative effect, according to the report, has been to raise the storage capacity of these rejuvenated lakes from 6 billion litres to 10.3 billion litres — an increase of 4.3 billion litres of freshwater capacity. Beyond storage, the company says these projects have helped recharge aquifers, reduce local flood risk, and turn degraded water bodies back into functioning ecosystems for surrounding communities.
Certified “Water Positive” — Using a Government Framework, Not a Private One
Perhaps the most credibility-relevant detail in the water section is Infosys’ choice of certification standard. Rather than relying solely on an internal or industry framework, the company says it pursued water positive and water neutral status based on NITI Aayog guidelines — India’s own government policy think tank — achieving Scope 1 certification (covering direct operational water offsets) at nine campuses this year: Chennai Mahindra City, Chennai Sholinganallur, Thiruvananthapuram, Mysuru, Hyderabad SEZ, Hyderabad STPI, Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar SEZ, and Bhubaneswar STPI.
The report also discloses a specific design standard for new buildings: water demand of less than 24 litres per person per day, which it claims is roughly 47% more efficient than the limits suggested by India’s National Building Code for office water consumption — one of the more precise, checkable claims in the entire document.
Waste: A 5R Framework and a 99% Diversion Claim
On waste, Infosys reports a 99% landfill diversion rate, built around what it calls a 5R framework: Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, Repurpose, and Recycle — segregating waste at the source into hazardous and non-hazardous streams across color-coded bins, then routing each material type to a specific downstream pathway, whether recycling, composting, or reuse.
The e-waste section is where the report gets most specific about circularity in practice. Infosys says it has shifted toward a “refurbishment-first” model for IT hardware — extending the working life of laptops, servers, and networking equipment through component replacement and re-imaging rather than disposal — and frames its migration from physical, on-premises servers to cloud infrastructure as a waste-reduction strategy in its own right, since it reduces the need for new hardware procurement and limits future e-waste generation from servers, storage, and networking gear at the source.
Even construction waste gets a specific destination in the report: debris from construction and demolition activity is disposed of through authorized recyclers who turn it into bricks and blocks, or reuse it for land leveling — a detail that, while minor, illustrates how granular the company’s circularity tracking has become.
Why the Infrastructure Detail Matters More Than the Percentages
Sustainability percentages are easy to publish and hard to independently verify. Physical infrastructure — wells, lakes, certified buildings, named partnerships with government think tanks — is harder to fake and easier to check. That’s arguably what makes this section of Infosys’ ESG Report 2025-26 more useful than its headline statistics: a 99% landfill diversion figure means relatively little on its own, but a 5R segregation system, named recycling partnerships, and a refurbishment-first e-waste policy describe an actual operating process behind that number.
The same goes for water. An “81.8% renewable electricity” figure is a number; 405 deep injection wells, 40 engineered lakes, and a government-certified water-positive designation at nine specific campuses are infrastructure. For a company the size of Infosys — more than 3,28,000 employees across 59 countries — that distinction between claimed outcomes and disclosed infrastructure may end up being the more durable test of whether its “climate positive by 2030” ambition holds up over the next four years.
Source: Infosys ESG Report 2025-26.
Exclusive Interview: Viktoriia Betina on Green Hydrogen, SAF and the Future of Decarbonisation
