10 Takeaways From South Asia BHR Forum - India Country Session

on

 


The UN South Asia Forum on Business and Human Rights is a crucial event to facilitate the multi-stakeholder dialogue needed to foster joint action on business and human rights in the region. Building multi-stakeholder systems will help to gradually address systemic gaps on human rights, labor rights, climate, gender, and other areas that are crucial to achieve the SDGs by 2030.

In the India country session today, I facilitated a breakout discussion on disclosures and benchmarking. Some of the key takeaways for me:

  1.  As a community we have started sharing more solutions than challenges, which is encouraging
  2.  Standardization of disclosure data is key for action, and its important to increase engagement to other stakeholders beyond investors
  3.  There isn't enough business case and political case yet to support BHR adoption in India. Engaging with industry associations and Parliamentarians can help change this.
  4.  Large scale informality of the economy and the significant impact of the MSME sector is crucial to tackle in advancing the BHR agenda in India
  5.  Benchmarks should be seen as a process rather than an end in itself. Disclosure based indices do not necessarily indicate level of impact or action and can be biased towards companies (often violators) who report more
  6.  A cluster development approach to increase the engagement of MSME sectors (already operating in clusters) will help streamline adoption of BHR and its reporting. It will also provide a meaningful structure for making sense of the reporting data coming from millions of MSMEs in the future.
  7. Non-financial reporting by companies cannot remain an annual exercise, needs to be available on a real-time basis. Public Information Officers in companies (or an equivalent) will help drive engagement of the disclosures by stakeholders.
  8. Important to develop sector guidelines based on the guidelines (e.g. NGRBC and NAP) and reporting framework to bring out material issues in each sector. Taking an approach of sector based reporting of supply-chain impact where 15-20 top companies in a sector (who often share suppliers) report on supply chain impact and due diligence together.
  9. Time to engage State level agencies and governments to move the BHR discourse beyond the national capital. The implementation of NAP and BHR agenda happens at the front-line, where there is a sheer lack of awareness and understanding of BHR.
  10. Important to engage consumers and consumer groups on business accountability through awareness campaigns. This can strengthen consumer demand for sustainable products and services.

I am glad that we will get a chance to tackle some of these issues in a session on benchmarking tomorrow and one on mandatory due diligence on Friday. Join us for these interesting sessions!

Below is a link to the session recording on Youtube:


 

 Originally published on Linkedin.

Comments

Post a Comment