ESG Performance | Futurescape (2024)

Companies undertake many types of responsible business activities. It is difficult to easily comprehend the breadth and scope of their work. Our study uses a measure called the Spread, which is indicative of how broad-based the responsible business activities of a company are and is a combined score of the environmental, societal and governance parameters.

THE HONOURS

• Godrej Consumer Products Ltd. is the top ranked company
• Unlike previous years, no group of companies dominates the top 10 rankings.
• Diversified companies like ITC and Grasim are in the top 10 rankings.
• No Public company figures in the top ten.

Responsible business reporting is slowly improving among the leading Indian companies, although the percentage remains low. Companies continue to adopt multiple reporting frameworks to report their responsible business performance. 27% of the companies studied had published an Integrated Report in 2019-20. Many of these had also published a GRI-based Sustainability report in the year.

Business Responsibility Report (BRR) is the mandated form of the responsible business reporting. Indian companies follow the National Voluntary Guidelines on Social, Environmental and Economic Responsibilities of Business that were published in 2011 (NVGs) to prepare BRR. In March 2019, the NVGs were updated and released as the National Guidelines for Responsible Business Conduct (NGRBCs). In our study, we find that while almost all continue to prepare BRR as per NVGs, three companies – JSW Steel, TVS Motors and Sundaram Clayton – prepared their BRR as per NGRBCs.

Companies perform well in Environment parameter, which is in-line with various national and global goals related to environment. This parameter primarily consists of initiatives which are internal to a company’s working hence we find that companies have been quick in implementing various measures.

Social and Governance parameters however have huge scope for improvement. We find that companies are mainly focused on complying with the domestic law instead of proactively analysing what is relevant for their business and redefining their benchmarks in the global economy.

Manufacturing companies, on an average, score far better than service companies - both overall and across criteria.

Private sector companies continue to perform better than public companies. While they perform better on environmental and governance issues, they lag slightly on the social front.

Industries

Information Technology and Materials are the top performing industries, while Financials and Other Financials continue to be laggards.