Cracking the Sustainability Quotient

The BW Businessworld India’s Most Sustainable Companies list is the result of an intensely research driven and data backed assessment of India’s 200 largest companies by revenue each year

THE BW BUSINESSWORLD India’s Most Sustainable Companies list is the result of an intensely research-driven and data-backed assessment of India’s 200 largest companies by revenue each year. The assessment process by Sustain Labs Paris using the SLP Cube assessment framework commences in April every year and thereafter takes 10 months to complete. All 200 companies are assessed free of cost.

In the second edition of BW Businessword India’s Most Sustainable Companies, for the first time, the opportunity to be assessed was opened up to companies beyond the research universe as well. Six additional companies were included such that we assessed 206 companies during the year.

Initial screening

As a first step, companies that were convicted at court for wrongdoing in the past three years were sifted out of the research universe. This year there were no such companies found. Data from audited company reports for FY202021 was then gathered for the remaining companies for 31 KPIs across six sides of the SLP Cube framework. As the next step, BW Businessworld and Sustain Labs Paris reaches out to CXOs of each of the companies assessed for conversations. These conversations serve to provide a deeper understanding of the company’s sustainability performance as well as to fill the data gaps for assessing the company as per the SLP Cube assessment framework. This year we had in-depth conversations with 52 companies. All 206 companies were sent their ‘data sheets’ that contained the data that we had collected for all 31 KPIs for their company. Companies were asked to inform us of discrepancies if any, or add details if required. The final data sheets were verified using a data triangulation process.