CSR Ratings of the largest 500 Indian companies

After writing the post on ITC e-Choupal, I’ve been looking for the complete list of Indian public companies that do triple bottom line reporting. I still haven’t found it but came across an interesting CSR (Corporate Social Responsibilities) ratings list for the Top 500 public Indian companies from Karmayog. Furthermore, they’ve been publishing this for four years now!

Karmayog has used a 6-point rating scale with Level 0 (lowest) and Level 5 (highest). The table below shows that no company has achieved Level 5 yet, 23% of companies are at Level 0 and only 12 (2%) are at Level 4.

Here’s the list of the 12 companies with Level 4 rating.

If you are like me, you know all the companies on this list barring three – Ballarpur Industries, Jubilant Life Sciences, and Kensai Nerolac Paints. 25% are IT majors. 25% are Tata companies. One bank. No Reliance group companies in list (not surprising!) What other patterns do you see?

Perhaps the biggest omission in Level 4 was ITC, especially considering their stellar work with e-Choupal. Turns out Karmayog gave them a Level 0 rating, which was really surprising so I went looking for the ratings criteria. Their Minimum Necessary Criteria (Necessary parameters that make a company eligible for a particular rating level) are listed below:

The criteria for Level 4 seems to match exactly what ITC has done with e-Choupal. Mystery deepens.

Which brings us to the final section “Negative Criteria that usually determine the maximum possible Rating”

“companies that make liquor, tobacco, etc.” = Level 0. Mystery solved!