ITC PSPD Kovai Water Stewardship — Alliance for Water Stewardship Platinum Certification (Coimbatore, India)

ITC Limited's Paperboards & Specialty Papers Division (PSPD) makes paperboard, partly from reclaimed post-consumer and post-industrial fibre, at its Kovai unit near Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. The unit draws water from a stream within the Upper Bhawani River Basin, a catchment exposed to erratic rainfall, unsustainable withdrawal and declining groundwater levels.

Rather than a simple per-hectare cash payment, ITC PSPD funds a watershed stewardship programme that rejuvenates traditional water-harvesting structures and builds new ones across the upstream catchment, supporting local farmers' irrigation and groundwater recharge. In 2019-20 the Kovai unit became the second facility in the world — and the first in India — to achieve Platinum-level certification under the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) International Water Stewardship Standard, an independently audited framework covering water balance, water quality, shared water-related risks and governance.

The programme has created water-harvesting potential of 1.01 million kilolitres through rejuvenated and newly built structures, reaching more than 5,000 farmers and delivering measured water savings of 8.51 million kilolitres — around eight times the unit's average annual water withdrawal. ITC's wider PSPD division, which also runs a similarly AWS-certified unit at Bhadrachalam in Telangana, reports being 'water positive' for 21 consecutive years to FY2022-23, and its national Integrated Watershed Development Programme (branded Mission Sunehra Kal) covers roughly 1.6 million acres across 45 districts in 16 states.

The Kovai unit's AWS certification and reported water-harvesting/savings figures are subject to independent third-party audit, but the company-wide 'water positive' claim and national watershed-acreage totals are self-reported by ITC and are not broken out with the same level of site-specific, third-party verification.

Read the full analysis: https://papermart.in/integrated-strategy-has-made-itc-pspd-water-positive/

Read the full analysis: https://papermart.in/integrated-strategy-has-made-itc-pspd-water-positive/