Wanting to do something for the community is nothing new at Larsen & Toubro (L&T). Santosh Kumar Singh, its Chief Sustainability Officer, says the company’s first community health centre was set up in 1967. The number has grown to over ten today. “In the 1990s, the first Construction Skill Training Institute was established. Again, it was in the direction of improving the availability of skilled manpower and making more youth employable in the construction sector,” is how he describes it. It has been recognised as the Most Sustainable Company in Infrastructure in the category of Sectoral Excellence in Manufacturing in this year’s BT India’s Most Sustainable Companies. When there are multiple business verticals, the concept of sustainability evolves and matures over time. Steps taken at a certain point in time tend to produce a much larger impact later. Sustainability reporting started at L&T in 2008, but it was not till a decade later that it moved to integrated reporting. “That’s when financial performance started connecting with the impact on the environment and society,” says Singh. One important moment was in 2021 when the company set a target for both carbon neutrality and water neutrality. “In many cases, what we did was purely voluntary.”