Promoting a transition with inclusion in India: the role of Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR)

This report highlights key indicators relevant to the just transition from the homegrown Business Responsibility Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) in India and creates a tool that investors and companies can use to signal just transition activities.

Based on 2023–24 BRSR disclosures by companies, the report applies its methodology to companies in the steel, cement, power and mining sectors. It analyses how each company demonstrates actions and achievements against the International Labour Organization’s just transition indicators, and where they could make improvements, mapped against the relevant BRSR principles. This illustrates how investors and companies could use information from the BRSR to assess relevant corporate just transition-related activities.

Main messages

• A growing number of companies are starting to make disclosures on sustainability as more corporate sustainability disclosure regimes emerge globally. The need to have greater standardisation across disclosure regimes is becoming more important.
• The Business Responsibility Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) in India is worth highlighting as a disclosure regime from a large emerging market that is growing rapidly, and for its potential role in bringing about an inclusive and just socioeconomic transition.

• This report incorporates several key indicators from the BRSR into a tool for investors and companies to assess and signal their just transition-related activities.

• For investors, the tool serves to evaluate the efforts of companies towards sustainable and inclusive growth, ensuring informed decision-making and actively engaging with companies to advocate for just transition-related actions.
• For companies, it offers a reflective lens to gauge their performance on just transition, enabling them to signal their actions to investors, identify gaps and improve strategies for a fair and equitable transition.
• Five of the just transition-relevant indicatorsfrom the BRSR framework are part of the ‘BRSR Core’ disclosure of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). These Core indicators are subject to third-party ‘assessment or assurance’ to enhance credibility and transparency.
• These indicators can be an excellent starting point for investors and other stakeholders wanting to engage Indian companies on the just transition: they provide an overview of the transition and just transition-related activities of the company in real time. The indicators can be incorporated by index fund managers and assessors of corporate sustainability in combination with their existing methodologies.