

ESG is coming to India but it is not a new concept; the definition has been in use for many years. It is a fundamental part of the social contract between business and society and usually managed as part of “CSR” or Corporate Social Responsibility.
There are a few definitions of ESG circulating, and we prefer: “Environmental”, “Social”, “Governance”. These three terms capture the three major axes of social responsibility that every corporate should be considering as they carry out their day-to-day business. Typically these three ESG concepts are translated into standards that are then applied across a business.
For more information on the detail of “what is ESG?” – please click here to read our one minute guide.
ESG standards are being implemented by companies around the world (EU, North American, Japan, Australia etc) and this is for themselves and their global supply chains.
Almost without exception, major corporate groups are hiring ESG professionals, creating new departments or adding significant resources to existing teams, and building out comprehensive policies on their ESG compliance – and announcing ambitious and public targets for ever tightening levels of compliance for themselves and their global supply chains.
And India itself is waking up to the realities of ESG within its own domestic supply chains and for Indian importers – especially listed companies. Climate change is going to affect India and India, in turn, is one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gases. But it goes deeper than that into areas like worker rights, alleviating poverty, building safer and healthier local communities. These are topics increasingly becoming a major focus for the media and for regulators.
The profile of ESG is rising rapidly.
Our technology forms the backbone of compliance reporting on the “S” and the “G” of ESG – social and governance. These are just as important as “E” – especially in terms of the day-to-day lives of millions of workers in large companies and their global supply chains. And our technology is very simple to implement and delivers immediate, continuous and real-time results that can be used with regulators, domestic and international corporate customers – and directly with consumers.
We provide a mobile app that workers can use, by invitation, to report on their conditions, pay, freedoms, health and safety. This is real-time, anonymous reporting that delivers a “social score” on a workplace. Social scores are standardised and comparable – a bit like a “Trustpilot” or “Yelp” rating on a company – except it is on a workplace and provided by workers rather than customers. This is a very powerful tool and the social score can be shared all the way through the supply chain to the end-consumer of a product or service in the shop or online.
ESG is coming to India – and our worker voice app is already in multiple Indian languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali. Click here for a podcast on the worker voice app and how it transforms relationships between suppliers and their international customers.
The social score / worker app system really matters. It delivers an independent and comparable measure of a workplace. It means each workplace can understand itself better – and then compare its position with its peers in the country and internationally.
Sharing the social score with corporate buyers – and then finally with consumers – means that more workplaces that have made investments in compliance can finally showcase what they have done and earn a return on that effort.
This is a measurement and communication problem. Until the arrival of our worker app and social score system, it was difficult to measure compliance with social and governance standards in workplaces and in the supply chain. Now this can be measured, in real-time and continuously – and the result communicated to buyers and consumers as the “social score”.
Workplaces with higher social scores can command better prices for their products and services – reflecting the investments that they make in their workplaces for the benefit of their workers.
ESG is coming to India – supported by the political will of the government and regulators – and demanded by the informed population inside India and internationally.
There will be an increasing focus on delivering environmental improvements – the “E” of ESG. This is a macro problem for India as a whole, given its reliance on coal – and is a micro problem for individual businesses across the country. New regulations are coming that require environmental performance to be measured and reported – and then change will start to come.
And on the “S” and the “G” of ESG – social and governance – our worker app / social score system will allow compliance with standards to be measured, managed and then improved. And crucially, investments made to make workplaces better can be recovered via the communication of the social score to corporate buyers and through to consumers.
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