Gemcon has published a five-year sustainability roadmap covering all thirteen operating companies. It contains four commitments, each with a date, a number and a named owner on the board.
The group has been reporting environmental performance for years, but division by division and on different bases — which made the numbers honest individually and useless collectively. The roadmap fixes that first: one measured baseline, then targets against it.
The four commitments
- 2026 — one measured baseline. A Scope 1 and 2 emissions inventory for every operating company, externally verified and published in full.
- 2028 — half the load renewable. The Panchagarh estate and the Charka Steel plant at 50% renewable load, with diesel generation retired at both sites.
- 2030 — 30% less carbon. Group manufacturing emissions cut by 30% against the 2024 baseline, reported quarterly by division.
- 2035 — zero process waste. No process waste to landfill anywhere in the group, and consumer packaging fully recyclable or compostable.
Why the baseline comes first
A target without a baseline is a press release. The 2026 inventory is deliberately the least exciting commitment on the list and by far the most important: until every division counts the same way, a reduction in one place can be an accounting change somewhere else.
We would rather publish a baseline that embarrasses us than a target we cannot be held to.
The verification is external and the methodology is published alongside the figures, which means a reader can check our arithmetic. Where a division's data is weak — and in the first year several will be — the report says so rather than estimating quietly.
What is already running
Solar is installed at the estate, the Charka Steel plant and four Meena Bazar sites, carrying 4.2 MW that used to come from the grid and from diesel. The retail packaging programme has taken 340 tonnes of plastic out of the supply chain. The Tetulia community programmes reach more than 50,000 households against a 68,000 target for the end of the decade.
Progress against every commitment is published in the annual report whether or not the year went well. That is the only condition on which a roadmap like this is worth writing.