The panoramic fifth-floor office windows in an unpretentious building on Bangalore’s Mahatma Gandhi Road overlook the drab terraces of nearby structures.

It is a Saturday morning. Soft Hindustani classic music wafts around the room. The conference table is lined with a vivid collection of coffee table books.

Seated in this modest office is the stubble-faced, cotton kurta-clad Anurag Behar, 41, whose title is CEO of Wipro Infrastructure Engineering at Wipro Ltd.

The title appears mysterious, given the growing importance of Behar’s role at the outsourcing giant.

Nearly two decades after a small family-owned vanaspati company transformed into a huge technology services brand, Behar is leading another game-changing move within Wipro — to turn it into a global brand in eco-sustainable technologies and services, shifting away from traditional rivals TCS and Infosys Technologies.

Some industry folks are wagering that the new business will rake in the next few billions for Wipro’s billionaire chairman Azim Premji, currently the fifth-wealthiest Indian. Going green is in tandem with Wipro’s and Premji’s much-espoused theme that good business ethics make great business sense.

“The business of business is not only to make money,” says Behar. “We want to participate in genuine, deep change in society.”

The unit has only a couple of hundred employees yet but Behar avers that this will be Wipro’s key business for the next 25 years. “We are going whole hog.”

Those watching are impressed. “This is brilliant,” says Sridhar Mitta, Wipro’s former global R&D head and now a venture capitalist. “If executed well, this could be gigantic...much bigger than Wipro.”

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