The Missing ESG Story

Coming from a people leadership background fundamentally shifts sustainability from being a compliance or footprint issue to a behavioural and cultural system.

I've always seen sustainability inside organisations as a question of:

• What do people believe is "acceptable"?
• What gets rewarded, tolerated, or ignored?
• How decisions are made under pressure

Environmental and technical lenses often focus on what needs to be done. A people lens focuses on why it doesn't get done consistently.

In India especially, where informal systems, hierarchy, and speed often dominate, sustainability succeeds or fails not because of lack of knowledge, but because of misaligned incentives, weak accountability, and cultural trade-offs.

So for me, sustainability is not a vertical, it's an organisational operating system.

The biggest gap is in depth, not intent. Companies are doing visible, reportable "S" work — but avoiding the structurally hard parts:

• Workforce dignity in extended ecosystems — Not just employees, but contract workers, gig workers, third-party staff. This is where India's largest inequities sit, and where measurement is weakest.
• Manager behaviour as a social impact lever — We still don't measure how day-to-day leadership decisions affect inclusion, burnout, psychological safety, or ethical conduct.
• Internal inequity transparency — Pay equity, career velocity, and opportunity access are rarely examined with rigour beyond surface disclosures.
• Supply chain human risk — Especially in sectors beyond IT — manufacturing, logistics, services — this remains under-audited and under-owned.

The uncomfortable truth: the most meaningful "S" work is also the least PR-friendly and the hardest to standardise.

Boards in India are increasingly aware, but not yet deeply accountable.

What I see across boards:

• ESG is often reviewed as a dashboard, not debated as a strategic risk or value driver
• Discussions are episodic, not embedded into core business decisions
• Ownership is diffused — rarely sits with the same seriousness as financial performance

The reporting–action gap exists because:

• Reporting is structured, comparable, and externally visible
• Action is complex, trade-off-heavy, and internally contested

The real test of board maturity is simple: does ESG influence capital allocation, executive compensation, and risk appetite?

In most cases today, the answer is still evolving.

This gap exists for three reasons:

• Engineering-led cultures prioritise substance over narrative — There's a discomfort with "storytelling" unless it feels fully validated and data-backed.
• Fear of scrutiny or greenwashing accusations — Especially in a global market, companies prefer under-communication to over-claiming.
• Fragmented ownership — Sustainability sits in one function, communications in another, and neither fully owns the integrated narrative.

Whose job is it? It has to be joint ownership between sustainability, HR, and communications — sponsored by the CEO.

Because a credible ESG story is not marketing, it's a translation of strategy, trade-offs, and progress — including what's not working.

The sharpest gap shows up in short-term trade-offs:

• When sustainability impacts margins
• When it slows down speed to market
• When it requires saying no to profitable but misaligned opportunities

Most companies believe in sustainability directionally. But commitment is truly tested when it competes with quarterly performance, investor expectations, or operational convenience.

In India, this tension is even sharper because growth pressures are intense.

The real differentiator is not intent, it's decision-making under constraint.

A good ESG story is:

• Specific, not aspirational — clear about what is being done and why
• Transparent about trade-offs — not just successes, but dilemmas and constraints
• Integrated into business strategy — not a parallel narrative, but part of how the company creates value
• Consistent over time — shows evolution, not just annual highlights

The best examples globally tend to connect sustainability to core business models, disclose failures or course corrections, and avoid over-polished narratives.

In India, we are improving but still tend to oscillate between understatement and over-curation.

The next shift will be from reporting to accountability narratives.

This means moving beyond frameworks and disclosures, towards explaining decisions, trade-offs, and real impact.

Three changes will define this shift:

• Data will get sharper, but so will scrutiny
• Stakeholders will expect coherence across actions, not just metrics
• Silence will no longer be seen as prudence — it will be seen as opacity

Is the sector ready? Partially. Large, global-facing firms are closer. But many organisations are still building internal alignment, strengthening data systems, and figuring out how much to say without overexposing themselves.

The real shift will happen when companies become comfortable saying: "here's what we got wrong, here's what we're changing, and here's what it will cost us."