Carbon Credits for India's Telecom Sector: Outside CCTS, Inside the Diesel Problem

India's telecom operators have spent the last two years building net-zero pledges, RE100 commitments and AI-driven energy programmes — yet the sector isn't on the government's mandatory carbon compliance list. That gap is exactly why telecom companies need a deliberate, voluntary carbon credit strategy rather than an accidental one.

Why Telecom Sits Outside CCTS

India's Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS) currently binds roughly 490 entities across seven energy-intensive sectors to emission-intensity targets: aluminium, cement, chlor-alkali and pulp & paper, notified by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in October 2025, followed by petroleum refining, petrochemicals and textiles in January 2026. Telecom, along with most services industries, is not on that schedule, and no notification currently sets a date for its inclusion.

That means a telecom operator, tower company or ISP has no obligation to buy Carbon Credit Certificates and no emission-intensity target to miss. But that's a reason to build a carbon strategy deliberately, not skip it. Without a compliance deadline forcing the decision, the case for buying credits has to rest on investor scrutiny, a net-zero commitment already made public, or a customer's procurement checklist. Our CCTS guide breaks down which sectors are obligated today and how that list is likely to expand.

The Real Hotspot Isn't a Data Centre — It's a Tower

Telecom's emissions problem sits in a less glamorous place than the data centres that get most of the ESG attention (a topic we cover separately in our piece on data centre carbon credits). India had over 854,662 mobile towers in operation as of mid-March 2026, per Department of Telecommunications passive-infrastructure data, and a meaningful share still run diesel generators for backup power, particularly in rural and low-grid-reliability circles. Industry estimates from Counterpoint Research put the sector's annual diesel draw at 5–9 billion litres — several million tonnes of CO2 a year from Scope 1 combustion alone, before counting Scope 2 emissions from grid electricity across the rest of the network.

That combination — diesel-heavy Scope 1 at the tower edge, grid-heavy Scope 2 at the core network and data centres — is what any telecom carbon strategy has to address, and it's why the sector's emissions profile looks more like a distributed industrial operation than a typical services business.

What Operators Are Already Doing

The three major private operators have each taken a different route to the same problem, and the pattern is instructive for smaller infrastructure providers and MVNOs sizing their own plan:

• Bharti Airtel has solarised nearly 27,000 network sites over the past two years and is working with Indus Towers to cut diesel dependence through battery-bank replacements; its data centre arm, Nxtra, has joined RE100 and targets net zero by 2031.

• Reliance Jio has installed over 174 MWp of solar capacity across more than 20,000 sites and has committed to cutting absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions 76% and Scope 3 emissions 66.5% by FY2028-29, alongside a shift from 1.2% renewable electricity sourcing in FY2020-21 to a 100% target by FY2029-30.

• Vodafone Idea reported Scope 1 emissions down 7.1% and Scope 2 down 10.4% in its FY2025-26 sustainability report, helped by an AI-powered network optimisation platform and a 26% stake in a wind energy SPV.

• Indus Towers, the shared tower infrastructure provider, runs a "Shut AC" programme replacing diesel generators with battery banks and fuel cells at sites where grid power is unreliable.

None of this activity is compliance-driven. It's a mix of direct abatement (solar, batteries, efficiency software) and renewable power procurement — both of which reduce the emissions a company would otherwise need to offset, rather than offsetting them after the fact.

Where Carbon Credits Actually Fit

For telecom, credits are a residual-emissions tool, not a first move. The sequence that makes sense: cut what direct abatement can cut (solarising sites, replacing DG sets with batteries, optimising network energy with AI), procure renewable power for what's left on the grid side, and only then use verified credits for the genuinely hard-to-abate slice — typically diesel backup in remote or flood-prone circles where solar and battery retrofits aren't yet economical, and any Scope 3 categories a company has publicly committed to neutralising ahead of its abatement curve catching up.

That's a smaller volume than a compliance-obligated sector would need, but it still has to be procured properly. Our carbon credit RFP checklist and guide on how to buy carbon credits in India both apply here — project type, vintage, registry and additionality questions don't change because the buyer is a telecom operator rather than a cement plant.

Getting the Volume and the Project Type Right

A mid-size tower company or regional ISP sizing its first credit purchase should start from its own diesel and grid-electricity inventory rather than an industry average, since rural-heavy networks and urban-heavy networks have very different Scope 1 profiles. Beyond that, sector fit matters: high-integrity avoidance and removal credits — cookstove and clean-energy access projects, or verified afforestation — tend to align better with a telecom brand's public-facing sustainability story than industrial-process credits, and our afforestation services page covers one option in that category.

If your telecom or infrastructure business is working out where direct abatement should stop and credits should start, our team can help size the number and find the right project type. Get in touch.