India Inc not yet prepared for mandatory business responsibility reporting, says a study

SEBI through its circular in August this year has made business responsibility reporting mandatory for the top 100 listed companies. According to the regulator, this non-financial report is to include environmental, social and governance initiatives, outlined as per National Voluntary Guidelines (NVG) that have been formulated by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

However, majority of the top 100 companies do not seem to be prepared yet in formulating their responsibility reports. A recent study conducted by Carbon Masters, a consulting agency in the field of sustainability, to find the preparedness levels of top BSE-100 companies, indicated that 64% of the top affected companies are not prepared to submit SEBI's prerequisite Business Responsibility (BR) report.

This comes in wake of the fact that the companies are required to submit this document along with their annual report for the fiscal year ending on or after December 31, 2012 .

The key findings of the study show that 64 companies are not prepared for business responsibility reporting. 36 companies are prepared or better prepared to submit a business responsibility report since they are already complying with the NVG or the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines.

Only seven companies were found to practice the NVG. 84% (21/25) of the PSUs and 52% (39/75) of the private companies were found to be not prepared.

The study found companies from the private sector to be more transparent in their reporting than the ones in the public sector.