ACC, Wipro, Reliance among India’s most sustainable companies: survey

ACC, Wipro, Reliance Industries, Mahindra & Mahindra and Tata Power are among India’s most sustainable companies, a new survey by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) said.

The industry chamber on Monday announced ‘Sustainable Plus’ labels for 100 largest companies by market capitalisation across 20 sectors.

Awarded across three levels (platinum, gold and bronze), corporate sustainability label ‘Sustainable Plus’ is based on a comprehensive analysis of companies across environment, social and governance dimensions of business, CII said in a release.

ACC, Wipro, Reliance Industries, Mahindra & Mahindra, Tata Power, Tata Motors, Tata Chemicals, Hindustan Zinc, Vedanta and ITC were given Sustainable Plus Platinum.

Seven companies got Sustainable Plus Gold, and the remaining 83 got Sustainable Plus Bronze, the survey said.

Out of the three dimensions of business, the survey found that governance continues to be the strongest dimension of sustainability as compared to environment and social.

“The impact of requirements of corporate governance, and transparency and disclosures in the Companies Act 2013 has helped companies do better on governance. Companies have adequate disclosures on board structure and committees, whistle blower mechanism for key stakeholders, and risk management framework for addressing business, financial as well as sustainability risks,” it said.

On the social dimension, companies are engaged in community development initiatives where health and sanitation, education and women empowerment top the cause list.

Out of the three, environment dimension had the lowest overall performance scores.

“Across sectors the companies have environmental policy and have commitments to reducing their overall eco-footprint. Aimed at reducing emissions, energy usage and waste management, the companies also integrate climate change risks into multidisciplinary company-wide risk management processes,” it said.

However, there is a scope of improvement on aspects such as targets and performance-related to environmental KPIs (GHG emissions, energy consumption, water consumption, and waste generation), long-term biodiversity management plan and evaluation of effectiveness of the systems, the survey said.

While no one sector dominated the platinum label, metals & mining, automobile, software, construction material and oil & gas got the best scores. Transportation, other financial services and media had the lowest overall scores.

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