NIF Adoption Low Among Indian Companies, Reveals Teri-Outlook Business Survey

It is not usual for countries, mostly engaged in border wars and trade-related tussles, to come to a common ground for something constructive. And that’s exactly what happened in September 2015 when all 193 member states of the United Nations (UN) adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Let’s go back a few years. By 2012, climate risks were increasingly mainstreamed in scientific and policy discussions, and the politics of global environmental negotiation had become structurally linked to development: who bears the costs, who gets the finance and how responsibility is allocated between historical emitters and late industrialisers.

SDG adoption was a negotiated response to more than a decade of mixed development experience, intensifying environmental risk and a political economy shaped by slow recovery from the 2008–09 financial crisis, widening inequalities and rising pressure on public budgets and social cohesion.

SDGs, which followed the Millennium Development Goals—a set of eight goals adopted by a majority of UN members targeting poverty, illiteracy and diseases among others—that failed to address many root causes, were adopted in a world that was both richer and more nervous than in 2000.

India embraced them because they aligned with both necessity and opportunity. India well understood that growth alone cannot be reduced to a single metric of GDP growth, while issues with sanitation, nutrition, health and the environment persist. Moreover, it was a diplomatic platform to argue for finance, technology transfer and policy space while projecting leadership.

In the Sustainable Development Report 2025, India entered the top 100 out of 167 nations for the first time. Despite gains, the report also showed that only 17% of the SDG targets are on track to be achieved by 2030 due to conflicts, structural gaps and limited fiscal space.

Sustainability Scoreboard

For years, sustainability was a glossy corporate-brochure term—invoked in boardrooms, splashed across annual reports. But somewhere over the past decade, it shifted from corporate embellishment to economic necessity.

Today, it is as much about supply chain resilience as it is about climate action; as much a passport to global markets, as it is a moral obligation. Companies now routinely speak of sustainability as a driver of growth, profitability and investor confidence.

And yet, in this race to go ‘green’ and move towards a low-carbon future, India Inc may have missed out on an essential compass.

“Teri-Outlook Business Chief Sustainability Officers’ Survey on Sustainability Leadership & 2030 Outlook” revealed a telling gap: nearly 40% of Indian companies are not aware or aligned with the National Indicator Framework (NIF)—the government’s central scoreboard for SDGs. A significant share of respondents reported either partial alignment or a lack of awareness of NIF.

The very framework built to measure national progress, including the private sector’s contribution, remains unfamiliar in many corporate corridors.

“At this stage, it is largely a gov-ernment-facing tool and there is not much clarity yet on how companies are expected to align their reporting with it,” says Shweta Agarwal, head of environmental, social and governance (ESG) at STL, an optical- and digital-solutions company.

The NIF is, in simple terms, India’s sustainability report card. It is a vast, structured set of indicators built to monitor the country’s advancement across all 17 SDGs. While aligned with the UN’s Global Indicator Framework, the NIF is tailored to Indian realities—its population, developmental challenges and policy priorities.

Since its launch, NIF has been designed to be dynamic. “The localisation ensures two things simultaneously: global comparability of India’s SDG performance and national relevance for policymaking,” says Saurabh Garg, secretary, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI).

NIF ranges from poverty reduction to renewable energy, from maternal health to waste-water management. Crucially, it also includes markers tied directly to corporate responsibility. One such example is SDG target 12.6, tracked through the “proportion of companies publishing sustainability reports”.

In other words, the NIF is not just a government ledger; it monitors what businesses do too.

Yet, for all its statistical depth, the NIF has failed to enter corporate consciousness meaningfully. Somewhere between policy drafting in Delhi and corporate social responsibility (CSR) meetings in Mumbai, the narrative did not take off.

Corporate Disconnect

By now, sustainability reporting is almost standard practice for large companies worldwide—96% of the world’s 250 biggest companies publish sustainability reports, as do 79% of the top 100.

In India too, thanks to regulatory nudges, sustainability disclosures have become mainstream among large corporate houses. Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has mandated extensive ESG disclosures through the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) for the top 1,000 listed companies since 2022–23. The BRSR also requires companies to map their activities to the SDGs, creating a link between corporate initiatives and global goals.

Then why are 39% of companies out of sync with the NIF?

Part of the answer is the complexity. “Each goal has multiple targets, and each target has associated national indicators. As a result, there is a very large number of indicators in use,” explains Souvik Bhattacharjya, associate director, resource efficiency and governance division, Teri

And then comes intent. NIF was never meant to be a regulatory framework. It was built as a national monitoring tool. Hence, companies have the option to pick and choose CSR themes that resonate with their ethos or communities, not necessarily those aligned with NIF priorities.

Why NIF Matters

India has set for itself an enormous climate ambition: net-zero emissions by 2070. It is already the world’s third-largest emitter. As a result, decarbonising supply chains, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and aligning operations with climate goals will require the private sector to do some heavy lifting.

Indian companies made significant progress in announcing net-zero and emission-reduction plans. But a study by the Institute for Energy Economic and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that most corporate disclosures remain weakly integrated with business strategy, financial planning and capital allocation.

The gap is relevant as transition plans are quickly becoming a core facet of how investors assess risk, price finance and determine long-term access to domestic and international markets.

India needs an estimated $10trn in financing to meet its 2070 net-zero goal. Hence, credible corporate transition is not merely a disclosure exercise but a prerequisite for capital mobilisation. Additionally, the study also found that most companies disclose an overarching environment-related metrics which do not cover specific guidance on climate risk, opportunities or even emissions reduction.

Furthermore, frameworks guiding corporate action—BRSR, Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)—while robust, do not fully map to India’s SDG priorities. BRSR is ‘Indianised’ but not SDG-centric; global frameworks tend to ignore localised developmental issues and mapping of developmental goals cannot happen centrally.

In BRSR, the materiality is decided in a fairly loose way. Companies are not given a very strict or fixed method to decide what issues matter most. Under BRSR, companies focus mainly on their environmental and social impact, must disclose some hard emissions data, but are not required to formally assess how these issues affect their financial performance.

The question, whether companies are ready to double down if required, sits at the heart of India’s development ambitions—towards 2030 (SDGs), 2047 (Viksit Bharat) and 2070 (net zero). Companies, however, are wary of excessive compliance.

On top of that, materiality remains a keyword. “We follow a multi-framework reporting strategy, anchored in GRI and IIRC [International Integrated Reporting Council], enabling us to articulate ESG performance in the language of financial relevance and materiality,” says PS Narayan, global head of sustainability and societal initiatives, Wipro.

Shantanu Srivastava, who leads sustainable finance and climate risk at IEEFA South Asia, also echoes the same sentiment. “The real question is not the number of metrics, but what is useful for investors,” he says. “NIF may be useful for the government or civil-society organisations, but a disclosure regime overseen by a capital-markets regulator exists primarily to protect investor interests and grow the securities market.”

In simple words, investors care about climate risk, governance quality or financial resilience but not necessarily every SDG indicator. So naturally, businesses prefer depth over breadth.

“We ensure strong local alignment through compliance with India-specific requirements such as Sebi’s BRSR Core, supported by independent assurance,” says Sandeep Chandna, chief sustainability officer, Tech Mahindra.

Building a Bridge

The government of India is aware of this gap and has begun nudging the two worlds closer. A major step in that direction came in late 2025, when MoSPI signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs (IICA). The core objective of this tie-up is to bridge a long-standing structural gap between national SDG measurement and private sector contributions.

“This framework also strengthens investor confidence,” says Garima Dadhich, head of School of Business Environment, IICA. “A business investing ₹100 crore today can show not only that it is investing responsibly, but also where and how it is contributing to national priorities.”

The road ahead is delicate. Policymakers are wary about altering existing frameworks. “Any move towards regulatory regimes would need to be carefully calibrated, ensuring reporting requirements do not become burdensome or counterproductive,” says MoSPI secretary Garg.

On the other hand, companies seek harmonisation—clearer definitions, aligned metrics and sector-specific guidance. The government acknowledges this. A person familiar with the matter says that Sebi is already examining interoperability and assessment disclosures from the top 1,000 listed firms to identify overlaps and weed out inefficiencies.

Industry stakeholders also see practical tools such as standardised guidance notes, sector-specific interpretations and illustrative use cases help translate national indicators into actionable, organisational metrics. This would bridge the gap between policy-level outcomes and day-to-today corporate reporting.