Disclosure Matters: Stepping towards Business Responsibility
‘Every successful corporate house has an obligatory responsibility towards the society, to make it a better place’.
Disclosure Matters is an analysis which puts forward the adherence of companies to their responsibility to all stakeholders, including shareholders, civil society etcetera. Professor Shri Ram Khanna, Managing Editor, Consumer Voice, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, independent journalist and Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, CEO Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs were the panellist on the floor for the talk.
Prof Sri Ram Khanna lambasting the auto companies
The National Voluntary Guidelines were released by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in July 2011. A Resolution was passed by Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI), which mandated the top 100 listed companies to report on their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance through a Business Responsibility Report (BRR). The BRR was envisioned to document measures by the corporate on different aspects such as equity, inclusion, public advocacy, transparency and ethics.
Professor Shri Ram Khanna named companies like Maruti and Tata Motors, accusing them of not adhering to BRR. He said “The auto companies have monopolised the market and they themselves regulate and fix the prices of auto products”. He described an incident where he was asked to pay 4500/- INR for engine oil, which was highly expensive. After the moderator asked him to elaborate further he said “From this dialogue you must churn out recommendations. Also the BRR framework needs to be tightened. It needs to be more specific and precise. We need to give this to SEBI and ask them to rectify the current framework of BRR”.
Bhaskar Chaterjee on his view on concealment in the corporate sector
Paranjoy Guha came in saying “Civil society and groups like us can put pressure to expedite the process”. Bhaskar Chaterjee interjected by saying “The black money information that has come to India, Who gave it to us? And, why? Paranjoy knows that that was the work of one dogged whistleblower, who leaked that information, put it out in the public domain. India would obtain all of that information not because of any government or any bank, but to directly wire that across to out Finance Minister. You can see here how much of concealment there is”. He further added “My worry is, what if the information provided is wrong? Is incorrect? Is deceptive? Is obfuscating? And deliberately sent to us to mislead many stakeholders? Can we than take this to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs or the Fraud investigating agencies? What I am saying is, much of the progress that is made in this domain happens to be step by step and I applaud that”.
The moderator of the event
Damandeep Singh, Director, India CDP, came in next saying “The idea is to encourage disclosure and get as much as we can. Our idea is to collect the information and put it out. I have had people in our training program from the Tata Group who said that this is it. Now they have to realise the importance of disclosure and they have to work with this because once someone accuses a firm to have put wrong information in the public domain, they have to spend twice as hard to rectify that”.
Photo Credits : Neel Kamal Pandey, OneWorldNews.
The talk proved to be very productive, and it was good to see progress being made in the process of Black Money elimination.
