Extent of Corporate Triple Bottom Line Reporting In Case of Indian Listed Power Companies

Abstract

Corporate social reporting discloses social and environmental information relating to an organisation’s interaction with its community, shareholders, physical and social environment to outsiders through corporate annual reports. Triple Bottom Line Reporting (subsequently refer to as TBLR) goes beyond the traditional way of reporting mechanism and encourages businesses to give closer attention to the whole impact of their commercial activities, over and above their financial performance. The Corporate Triple Bottom Line Reporting is based on three pillars - (i) environmental, (ii) social, (iii) economic causes. In this study, Corporate Triple Bottom Line (CTBL) disclosure items are handpicked from the annual reports/corporate social responsibility reports/sustainability reports of the sample units after a thorough examination of the contents of annual reports/corporate social responsibility reports/sustainability reports. The level of Triple Bottom Line reporting in India is in its infancy and still evolving. The three dimensions for TBL Reporting in India are people, planet and profit, which lead to sustainable development. We have considered listed companies of Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) comprising BSE 500 index as our population. Considering time and resource constraints, it was decided to restrict the survey only power generating companies (15 units) among those 500 units. Accordingly, annual reports/corporate social responsibility reports/sustainability reports for these 15 numbers of listed power companies were planned to be reviewed. For measuring the extent of corporate triple bottom line reporting in annual reports/corporate social responsibility reports/sustainability reports of the companies, we have constructed a weighted disclosure index based on the previous empirical studies. The study evaluated the combined corporate triple bottom line disclosure score value of the sample companies based on performance with respect to 3 primary indicators – environment, social and economic. The maximum score of corporate triple bottom line disclosure is high enough i.e. 77.3% and the minimum score of corporate triple bottom line disclosure is very low i.e. 22.6%.