GRI and CDP Reporting: voluntary disclosure to the frameworks your investors and customers read.

They are the international sustainability reporting framework maintained by the Global Reporting Initiative, comprising universal standards on the reporting basis, general disclosures and material topics, together with sector and topic standards. GRI takes an impact view: it reports how an organisation affects the economy, environment and people, not only how sustainability affects the organisation.

CDP runs an annual environmental disclosure system on behalf of investors and purchasing organisations, covering climate change, water security and forests. Companies complete a questionnaire and receive a score from A down to D-, with a lower grade for non-response. It is a scored benchmark rather than a report, which changes how you prepare for it.

GRI produces a narrative report you publish and control. CDP is a structured questionnaire you submit into a scoring methodology you do not control, on a fixed annual cycle. GRI is broad across ESG topics; CDP is deep on environmental themes. Most companies that do both build one data set and present it two ways.

No. Neither is required by Indian law. They become effectively compulsory through commercial pressure: an investor with a stewardship policy, a multinational customer that scores its suppliers through CDP, or a lender that expects a recognised reporting framework. Companies typically start because a counterparty asked.

Responses are assessed against levels (disclosure, awareness, management and leadership) with a band assigned from A to D-. Points come not only from performance but from evidence of governance, board oversight, target setting, third-party verification and scenario analysis. A company with good emissions performance and weak process documentation routinely scores below one with the reverse profile.

They overlap substantially in underlying data, and the BRSR permits cross-referencing where a disclosure has already been made under another recognised framework. The practical discipline is to build one governed data set for the year and derive all three outputs from it, because three separately assembled numbers for the same parameter is a finding waiting to happen.

The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures completed its work and its recommendations have been absorbed into the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards issued by the ISSB, with the ISSB taking over monitoring of climate-related disclosure. The four-pillar structure (governance, strategy, risk management, metrics and targets) remains the organising logic, so TCFD-aligned work already done is not wasted.