Practical, sourced explanations of BRSR, carbon accounting, assurance and the frameworks — answer first, with worked examples.
BRSR — the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report — is the ESG disclosure SEBI requires from India's top 1,000 listed companies, filed with the annual report in PDF and XBRL. It has three sections, follows the nine principles of India's National Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct, and its core indicators must be independently assessed or assured, on a glide path that reaches the top 1,000 for FY 2026-27.
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BRSR Core is a set of key BRSR indicators under nine attributes — GHG, water and energy footprints, circularity, employee wellbeing and safety, gender diversity, inclusive development, fairness to customers and suppliers, and openness of business — that listed companies must have independently assessed or assured. It applies to the top 500 for FY 2025-26 and the top 1,000 from FY 2026-27.
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Scope 1 is the greenhouse gas a company emits from sources it owns or controls, such as its boilers, furnaces, generators and vehicles. Scope 2 is the emissions from producing the electricity, steam, heat or cooling it buys. Scope 3 is every other emission in its value chain, in 15 categories — from purchased goods to the use of sold products. BRSR Core requires Scope 1 and 2; Scope 3 is a BRSR leadership indicator.
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Emissions are activity data multiplied by an emission factor — litres of diesel, kilowatt-hours or tonnes of material times the kilograms of greenhouse gas each unit releases — with every gas converted to CO₂e using one set of global warming potentials. Common errors come from units, from a factor that does not fit the activity, and from not recording which factor was used.
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An assessor or assurer tests whether each BRSR Core figure can be supported — by source records, a documented method, named approvals and a trail of every change. It helps to collect evidence with each figure as it is entered, separate who enters from who approves, explain unusual movements, and fix the boundary and factors before year end rather than during fieldwork.
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Reliable ESG data comes from a simple design decided before collection starts — which indicator, at which site, how often, in what unit, entered by whom, approved by whom, with what evidence. For suppliers, ask only the partners that matter (BRSR's 2% rule is a good start), ask for little, make answering easy, and record how good each answer is.
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GRI reports a company's impacts on the economy, environment and people; the ISSB's IFRS S1 and S2 report sustainability risks and opportunities that affect the company's prospects, for investors; ESRS, under the EU's CSRD, require both views — double materiality. BRSR is India's mandatory report. They share many measures, such as Scope 1 emissions, but they are not interchangeable.
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The BRSR is filed with NSE and BSE in two forms on the same day as the annual report — a PDF for people and an XBRL file for machines — and the two must match. The XBRL is usually prepared with the exchanges' BRSR utility, validated and uploaded; common causes of trouble are units, scaling, "not applicable" answers without reasons, and figures that differ from the PDF.
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A walkthrough around your sites, frameworks and deadlines — with the evidence and approvals behind every figure.