Examination of sustainability reporting practices in Indian banking sector

Abstract

Sustainability reporting is at the core of designing corporate sustainability environment. The study has been conducted on Indian banking sector to examine the extent of sustainability reporting by the banks operating in India. Sustainability report, corporate social responsibility report, business responsibility report and annual report (FY 2015-16 & 2016-17) of the banks were analysed and coded using content analysis technique against sustainability indicators derived from review of literature, GRI G4 guidelines, and National Voluntary Guidelines on responsible business conduct. This is one of the first studies to examine the extent of sustainability reporting by the commercial banks in India in line with major sustainability-related standards & guidelines. The result of the study shows that the banks in India are much slower in adopting sustainability reporting practices. It was found that sustainability issues which are of the highest priorities for the banks are directly related to their business operations like financial inclusion, financial literacy, energy efficient technology etc. The environmental consideration indicators are relatively unaddressed by most of the banks in India. The results of the study also show that there is a significant difference in the disclosure of environmental and internal socio-environmental indicators between public and private sector banks in India. This study is expected to contribute to banking sector and all the stakeholders in understanding more about the limitations in implementing sustainable reporting in India.

European Financial Services SMEs: Language in Their Sustainability Reporting

“…Thus, if we use this lexical analysis to understand whether these financial services SMEs properly developed their sustainability reporting, the obtained results show that although they used some specific words to meet the minimum requirements, the financial dimension of reporting continues to be more important, and the other information is used to increase the length of the report but still does not reflect significant environmental and social impacts. According to previous studies [75], sustainability reporting in financial companies has as the highest priorities those directly related to their business operations.…”

Corporate Environmental Disclosure in India: An Analysis of Multinational and Domestic Agrochemical Corporations

“…Indian CSR reports have often contained little related to environmental issues [37,177,192]. Even a recent study of the banking sector in India found the disclosure of sustainability considerations still in a "nascent" stage" [114] (p. 13). This research found that, over a fifteen-year period, each of the corporations from the agrochemical industry studied-subsidiary companies operating in India, their parent companies, and domestic Indian companies-had significant changes in the character of their CED.…”

“…The CED studies differ substantially in the focus of the research and in their approaches and methods. Unlike some of the studies of the broader CSR research that investigated a specific industrial sector (e.g., [112][113][114]), they each investigated companies across multiple sectors. Half of the studies were empirical in nature (i.e., theories may be mentioned but do not form the basis of either method or discussion).…”

“Environmental Performance Reporting in Commercial Banks of India: Exploring Association with Financial Performance”

“…Research aims to examine the extent of environmental performance reporting and compare the association amid environmental performance and financial performance on a sample of 21 financial sector [45]. Content analysis which has been extensively utilized in the extant literature has been employed in this research to determine environmental disclosure score [46].…”

“…Hypothesis 4: There is a significant association between environmental performance and return on equity of public sector banks operating in India. [45]. Involvement of banks towards environmental activities and its reporting is still in its preliminary phases.…”