Parul University’s Sustainability Initiatives: From a Solar-Powered Campus to a Centre for Sustainability and ESG

The test of a university’s sustainability claim is not its brochure but its campus. Parul University’s sustainability initiatives are visible in how the campus runs day to day, how it measures its own practice, and how it teaches sustainability to students, including the international cohort at its Global Discovery Program sustainability summer school. Set out together, they show sustainability treated as an operating principle rather than a marketing line.

The most concrete initiatives are in energy and waste. The University has installed rooftop solar to the maximum permitted capacity, and to raise on-site generation further, it built an additional solar plant with an output of 0.6 MW near its electricity distribution facility.

On waste, the University has moved to eliminate single-use plastic drinking bottles across the campus, and because the campus is very large, it is developing suitable alternatives so that plastic is not used for drinking water at all in the near future. Proper waste management is treated as a baseline practice rather than an initiative to announce.

Actions on their own are hard to verify, which is why the University runs a dedicated Centre for Sustainability and ESG. Its role is the measurement half of sustainability: keeping records of initiatives, maintaining compliance data, organising that information usefully, and monitoring practices across the institution in a structured way.

This is the distinction between ESG and Sustainability made operational, where the campus practices represent sustainability, and the Centre provides the ESG framework that documents and tracks them. The Centre also conducts interdisciplinary research and is open to collaboration with other universities and organisations, which extends its work beyond the campus boundary.

A university’s sustainability record is strongest when students learn from it directly. The Centre for Sustainability and ESG co-runs the Global Discovery Programme, the university’s sustainability summer school, where students from Vietnam, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Morocco study sustainability alongside domestic students through the framework of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Teaching sustainability to an international cohort, using the campus itself as a live case, represents a different level of commitment from adding a single elective. It turns the university’s own practices into a teaching instrument.

Institutional practice matters partly because national targets depend on institutions adopting them. India has committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2070, a timeline set later than many economies because of the country’s development stage, population, and the cost of clean technology. The route is framed by two Government of India initiatives that universities are expected to help carry: the Panchamrit, India’s five climate commitments announced at COP26, and the Lifestyle for Environment (LiFE) Mission.

The Panchamrit commitments are specific: 500 GW of non-fossil energy capacity, half of all energy from renewables, a cut of one billion tonnes in projected emissions, and a 45 per cent reduction in the carbon intensity of GDP, all targeted for 2030, culminating in net zero by 2070. A campus that generates its own solar power and eliminates single-use plastic is doing, at institutional scale, exactly the kind of ground-level adoption these national goals require.

Just as the eagle must break its own beak and shed its feathers to renew itself, real change is uncomfortable before it is progress.

The teaching deliberately reduces sustainability to choices a single person can make: using a reusable bottle instead of single-use plastic, switching off a vehicle engine at a traffic light, walking short distances or finishing a journey on foot, printing less, and managing waste properly. The point pressed on students is that policy and frameworks are the apex of a system that only works if it is built from the ground up.

Change of that kind is rarely comfortable, which is why the eagle’s painful renewal was offered as a metaphor: individuals and institutions both have to accept an awkward transition before a more sustainable state is reached.