For years, ESG communication in India meant a glossy sustainability report, a few tree-planting photos, and a paragraph or two in the annual report nobody outside the compliance team read closely. SEBI changed the terms of that conversation when it made Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting mandatory for the top 1,000 listed companies starting FY 2022–23. Once ESG claims had to be filed as structured, auditable data rather than written as prose, the game shifted from storytelling to numbers, and PR teams had to shift with it.
ITC’s Wellbeing Out of Waste (WOW) programme is a useful case because the ROI link isn’t abstract. WOW collects dry waste, much of it paper and packaging, and feeds a chunk of it back into ITC’s own paperboard and packaging business. The programme gets covered as a sustainability story, but it also lowers raw material costs and supports a business line that contributes meaningfully to ITC’s revenue. When ITC talks about WOW now, the communication increasingly cites tonnes of waste collected and the number of schools and citizens involved, figures a CFO can defend to an analyst, not just a green initiative a CSR head can defend to a journalist.
Hindustan Unilever’s water conservation work follows a similar arc. HUL has spent years building water-positive factories and funding watershed programmes through its foundation, work that used to be framed almost entirely in CSR language. It’s increasingly framed differently now: as risk management for a company that depends on water-intensive manufacturing in a country facing genuine water stress, and as a factor that shows up in HUL’s cost base and its standing with institutional investors who screen for ESG risk before allocating capital.
The IT services sector shows the sharpest, least sentimental version of this shift. Infosys and TCS didn’t commit to carbon-neutral operations mainly because clients asked nicely. Large Western enterprise clients, several with their own net-zero commitments, now factor a vendor’s Scope 3 emissions into procurement decisions, because the vendor’s footprint counts against the client’s own targets. For an IT services company, a credible emissions story isn’t a communications add-on. It’s increasingly a condition for winning and renewing large contracts, which makes the ESG number a revenue number in a direct sense.
Green and sustainability-linked financing has given this trend a hard price tag. Companies like ReNew Power and JSW have raised capital through green bonds where the interest rate is explicitly tied to hitting sustainability targets: miss the target, and borrowing gets more expensive. Mahindra & Mahindra has used sustainability-linked loans on similar terms, where the cost of debt moves with progress against emissions and safety benchmarks the company has publicly committed to. That’s about as close as ESG communication gets to a line item on a balance sheet.
There’s an employer branding angle too, one that shows up clearly in hiring data from IT and FMCG firms. Godrej’s long-running Good & Green initiative, which ties CSR spending to employability programmes for young people from low-income backgrounds, gets cited internally by the company as part of its pitch to campus recruits who say they weigh a company’s social record when choosing between competing offers. Purpose communication aimed outward at consumers is increasingly doing double duty as retention and recruitment messaging aimed inward at employees.
None of this has eliminated greenwashing. Plenty of Indian brands still run purpose campaigns detached from anything measurable in the business, and analysts have gotten sharper at calling that out publicly when the numbers don’t back the story. But the direction of travel is clear: the companies getting real traction with purpose-led communication are the ones that can show a rupee figure attached to it, lower cost of capital, retained contracts, reduced input costs, rather than the ones simply reaching for a cause because a competitor did.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.
