CB BureauThe recently released ‘BT Sustainable Development (SD) Index – an assessment of business performance in India – 2009-10’ found Tata to be the best performer on sustainable development indicators. Conversely, according to a report titled Ethical Asia, by global research firm CLSA, the Tata group’s arm Tata Motors and ITC need to make a significant improvement in terms of CSR disclosure.
Reliance Industries (RIL) scored high in both the researches. The CLSA report, which called Tata Motors and ITC ‘laggards’, ranked the companies on a scale of one-to-five for their CSR standards and found RIL, Cathay Pacific and Mitsubishi UFG as the only three companies to get the highest score of five.
Naming RIL among its top picks, CLSA said that it was an Indian energy company that ‘provides very good data and goes well beyond required disclosure.’
CLSA said that ITC’s CSR activities were hyped by ‘talking loud’ and Tata Motors had run into ‘bumps in the road’. In sharp contrast, Reliance Industries was ‘always reliable’ when it came to giving back to the people.
Terming ITC as among the companies with the ‘most room to improve’, CLSA said that the ‘Indian consumer company only provides an online version of its CSR report and self-declared it as an A+ report, when there is clearly a lack of information and data to come close to that grade.’
The CLSA rankings were based on how well the CSR reporting by the companies depicted the five criteria of environmental impact, social impact, corporate governance, transparency and level of detail.
On the contrary, the BT SD Index findings, wherein Tata and ITC are among the ‘best performers’, are based entirely on a survey of 253 academic, corporate, government, media and NGO leaders from all over India.
The findings are based only on the ‘perception’ about business performance on sustainable development indicators and ‘not’ on actual performance, says the report, which has been developed in partnership with global public opinion company GlobeScan
Arun Seth, chairman, BT India, agrees that although the awareness about issues is increasing, the ‘actual’ performance is not happening. He told Financial Times that though the public awareness on sustainable development is on the rise, it is not being matched by real progress at the ground level in India. ‘There is need to align intent with action,’ he said.
SD Index found that when it came to sustainable development issues, companies rated water resource management as the most important issue requiring urgent attention. Education, healthcare, natural resource management and climate change were the other pressing issues.