ESG Governance in Indian Boardrooms: Moving from Disclosure to Accountability

The Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting framework has now produced two full cycles of disclosures from India's top 1,000 listed companies. CXO India Insights has reviewed a cross-section of these reports and the pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched corporate governance evolve: the form is present before the substance. Companies are disclosing; fewer are governing. The distinction matters enormously. Disclosure is a compliance exercise — it can be delegated to the sustainability team, packaged by a consulting firm, and signed off at a board meeting that spends eighteen minutes on the topic. Governance is something different. It requires the board to understand material ESG risks in the same way it understands financial risks: with clear metrics, honest assessments of where the company stands against targets, and a willingness to make difficult trade-offs when ESG commitments conflict with short-term financial performance. The boards that are genuinely ahead of this curve share several characteristics. They have at least one director with substantive ESG expertise — not a former regulator who attended a two-day seminar, but someone who has managed environmental or social risks as a practitioner. They have integrated ESG KPIs into executive compensation in a meaningful way — not a token 5% weighting on a vague metric, but measurable targets tied to specific outcomes. And they have adopted a materiality assessment process that is genuinely honest about what risks matter to their specific business model, rather than a copy-paste of their sector peers.