Corporate Triple Bottom Line Reporting: An Empirical Study on the Indian Listed Power Companies

Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach is a proactive step in providing increased transparency and a broader framework for decision making. In this paper, we have considered listed companies of Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) comprising BSE 500 index as our population. Considering time and resource constraints, it was decided to restrict the survey to only power generating companies (15 units) among those 500 companies. Annual reports/corporate social responsibility/sustainability reports for these 15 numbers of listed power companies were reviewed. For measuring the extent of corporate triple bottom line reporting in annual reports/corporate social responsibility reports/sustainability reports of the companies, we have constructed a weighted disclosure index based on the previous empirical studies. The study evaluated the combined corporate triple bottom line disclosure score value of the sample companies based on performance with respect to 3 primary indicators - environment, social and economic. The maximum score of corporate triple bottom line disclosure is high enough i.e. 77.3% and the minimum score of corporate triple bottom line disclosure is very low i.e. 22.6%. None of the sample power companies has attained more than 80% corporate triple bottom line disclosure score; on the contrary 40% companies have attained less than 40% corporate triple bottom line disclosure score.