Sustainability Reporting under Global Reporting Initiative – Performance of the Companies in India

As the public awareness is increasing, societies are expecting an increasing amount of accountability from the corporate sector. The firms are being increasingly made to realise that it is not only their profitability which is relevant but also the sustainability. The realisation that business organisations impact the environment and the society has brought an increasing pressure on the firms to report on these parameters. This pressure has led to the emergence of a more comprehensive framework for reporting which extends beyond finance and covers environmental and social parameters too which is called as sustainability reporting. Various frameworks at the national and international level are available to the companies for this reporting. Global Reporting Initiative is one such framework at the international level. The progress of Indian Companies under GRI was slow initially from 1999 i.e. when GRI was introduced. However, over the period of years the performance of Indian companies as far as reporting is concerned has been increasing. The present paper attempts to study the performance of companies in India under the GRI framework.