Section A of the BRSR carries the general disclosures: who the listed entity is, what it makes or sells, where it operates, how many employees and workers it has, and how it is structured. It is the descriptive foundation the performance sections are read against.
Section A is the first of the three sections of the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report. It establishes the profile of the reporting entity before any performance data appears, so that a reader can interpret the numbers in Section C against the size, sector and structure of the business.
What Section A gathers
- the identity of the listed entity, including its corporate identity details and registered address
- the products and services it provides, and the sectors it operates in
- the locations and scale of its operations, including plants and offices
- the composition of its employees and workers, including differently abled employees and workers, and participation of women
- its holding, subsidiary and associate company structure
- basic transparency and compliance details, including grievance-redressal and complaint information
Why it is not simply boilerplate
Section A does more than introduce the company. Several of its data points become denominators later in the report. Employee and worker counts feed the wellbeing, safety and diversity disclosures in Section C. The turnover figure recorded here is the basis for the intensity ratios that BRSR Core requires. An error in Section A therefore propagates into the assurable indicators, which is why it is checked first rather than filled in last.
A common sequencing mistake
Because Section A looks administrative, it is often completed at the end from records that were never reconciled with the performance data. That produces mismatches between headcount in Section A and headcount used in Section C, which an assurance provider will raise. Completing Section A from the same reconciled source that feeds Section C avoids the rework.
Sources: SEBI BRSR format, Annexure I
The BRSR guide sets out how the three sections fit together. BRSR reporting services covers building the data systems that keep the sections consistent.