BRSR Core reporting, with the source document behind every number.

What BRSR Core is

The Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report, or BRSR, is the sustainability disclosure format SEBI requires listed entities to file with their annual report. BRSR Core is the smaller set of key performance indicators inside it that must carry reasonable assurance from an independent assurance provider.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. The wider BRSR is a narrative you write. BRSR Core is a set of numbers somebody else has to sign off on, which means every figure needs an evidence trail that survives being asked "where did this come from".

Assurance under BRSR Core reaches the top 1,000 listed entities by market capitalisation in FY2026-27, having phased in from the largest issuers first. If you are inside that band, the reporting year you are living through now is the one that gets assured.

The nine BRSR Core attributes

Each attribute is reported as an intensity or a ratio, not a raw total, so the underlying activity data has to be complete before the metric means anything. The right-hand column is the evidence an assurer will ask you to produce.

Attribute	What is measured	Source documents to have ready
Greenhouse gas footprint	Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and their intensity per rupee of turnover	Fuel and diesel invoices, refrigerant top-up logs, electricity bills, DISCOM statements, grid emission factor used
Water footprint	Total water consumed, water intensity, and water discharged by destination	Water bills, borewell meter logs, ETP and STP discharge records, consent to operate
Energy footprint	Total energy consumed, energy intensity, and the share from renewable sources	Utility bills, captive generation logs, open access and PPA statements, REC certificates
Embracing circularity	Waste generated by category, waste intensity, and waste recovered or reused	Hazardous waste manifests, recycler receipts, weighbridge slips, board declarations
Enhancing employee wellbeing and safety	Wellbeing spend as a share of revenue, and safety related incidents	Payroll and benefits ledgers, insurance premium records, incident registers, safety audit reports
Enabling gender diversity in business	Gender representation and gross wages paid to women as a share of total wages	HRMS headcount extracts, payroll registers, POSH complaint records
Enabling inclusive development	Input material sourced from MSMEs and small producers, and job creation in smaller towns	Vendor master with Udyam registration, procurement spend reports, location-wise payroll
Fairness in engaging with customers and suppliers	Instances of concentration of purchases and sales, and data privacy or consumer complaints	Top vendor and customer spend reports, related party disclosures, complaint registers
Openness of business	Concentration of purchases, sales and loans with related and trading house parties	Related party transaction schedules, general ledger extracts, board approvals

What assurance actually checks

Reasonable assurance is a materially higher bar than the limited assurance most sustainability teams have met before. In practice the questions land in four places.

• Completeness of boundary. Every entity, plant and leased site inside the reporting boundary is included, and anything excluded is named and justified. Missing a leased warehouse is the single most common finding.
• Traceability of every figure. Each number can be walked back to a primary document without a spreadsheet in between that nobody can explain. Reconstructed estimates get flagged.
• Consistency of factors. The emission factors, calorific values and conversion factors used are named, versioned and applied the same way across sites and across the year.
• Controls over the process. Who entered the number, who reviewed it, and whether that review left a record. An unrecorded review is treated as no review.

Where most reporting teams lose time

The failure is almost never the calculation. It is that the data sits in seventeen places: an EHS spreadsheet at one plant, a facilities inbox at another, an HRMS export, a procurement system, and a folder of PDF utility bills that nobody has opened since they were filed. Assembling that once takes a quarter. Assembling it again next year, with an assurer asking follow-up questions, takes another one.

What changes the economics is holding the evidence, not just the answer. When each figure carries its source document, its factor and its approval trail from the moment it is captured, the assurance cycle stops being a reconstruction project and becomes a review.

How BRSR Core connects to your other obligations

The same activity data feeds more than one regime. Fuel and electricity records that produce your Scope 1 and 2 intensity for BRSR Core also underpin your CBAM embedded emissions if you export to the EU, your CCTS compliance if you sit in a notified sector, and your SBTi inventory if you have a validated target. Build the ledger once and each disclosure becomes a view of it, rather than a separate annual scramble.

The compliance timeline on our homepage shows how those dates line up over the next two years.