Are Indian Business Media Publications Covering Enough News on Sustainability? New Index to Track

In a bid to assess the current levels of engagement on sustainability issues driven by India's leading business media, Gurgaon-based Great Lakes Institute of Management has launched a one-of-its-kind index to track and evaluate the extent and relevance of sustainability content being generated and disseminated. The Sustainability Content Occurrence and Relevance Evaluation (SCORE) index has been developed by the institute's Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development in collaboration with India Data Hub.

The newly-launched SCORE index seeks to address this gap by supporting journalists, policy makers, students and researchers in generating and disseminating sustainability-related content. The index will be available on a weekly basis on the official website of the institute.

According to the institute, the primary objective is to track relevant developments and assign a weekly score based on how the country's top five business dailies fare on the coverage of sustainability-related news, while keeping in mind the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). According to the institute, it is essential to see how business dailies are talking about sustainability.

“From January 2023, we started to extract news items that appear in five leading business dailies in the country,” said Bappaditya Mukhopadhyay, a professor at the management institute. He clarified that insights on the index will be available every Tuesday even though news from publications will be tracked on a daily basis.

Speaking at the launch of the index, Rajesh Agrawal, Additional Secretary at Department of Commerce, said that the launch demonstrates India's commitment towards meeting the SDG goals. Agrawal also highlighted India’s recent progress citing the country's overall SDG score of 71 in 2023-24, marking a significant progress from 57 in 2018.

However, Agrawal also mentioned that businesses are currently focusing too much on supply-related issues for green products, and ignoring how to generate demand. He also encouraged businesses to work together to facilitate and advance sustainable consumption and production.

Sanghamitra Bhattacharya, Director of Great Lakes Institute of Management's sustainability centre, described the index as "an SDG tracker" that is “similar to stock market trackers".

While developing the index, the team identified some terms related to sustainability by referring to the UN SDG documents. Around 1,200 terms were identified from those documents, following which they were evaluated on the basis of importance and benefit. Based on these terminologies and the scores assigned to them, a master document was created which now guides the assessment process of the index.

India is currently making conscious efforts towards sustainable development, largely driven by government policies, discussions and business institutions. However, there is still no clarity on how many people have access to such updates. Speaking on the issue, Mukhopadhyay said, “The whole idea is that if we want to do things on sustainability, we need to first talk about it.”