IJEP 41(2): 187-193 : Vol. 41 Issue. 2 (February 2021)
Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal – 462 003, India
Abstract
The global environmental and social issues have forced the corporate entities to pay attention to the social and environmental aspect of their business. Over the years, this concern witnessed a paradigm shift from traditional reporting of financial performance to non-financial performance as well. Majority of the companies utilize a comprehensive framework of the sustainability reporting in order to measure and disclose their non-financial performance based on the sustainability reporting guidelines. Sustainability reporting continues to be an evolving trend in India and is becoming a standard practise in order to compete with the global counterparts. This study aims to compare the sustainability reporting practices followed by big selected companies in the Indian cement industry. India is currently home to the world’s 2nd largest cement market, both in terms of production and consumption. Cement has a heavy environmental footprint as the production of cement releases CO2, as well as the production process consumes a lot of energy. Thus despite the popularity and profitability of the cement industry it is one of the highly polluting industries and contributes majorly to the global greenhouse gas emissions. In the backdrop of this, the current paper attempts to assess the sustainability performance of the leading companies in Indian cement industry and analyze their reporting trend on environmental, social and economic dimensions based on GRI G4 guidelines.
Keywords
Sustainability, Sustainability reporting, Cement, GRI, Disclosure, Triple bottom line
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