XBRL drives ESG analytics in India
At the XBRL Asia Round Table yesterday in Mumbai we were able to share some initial work on the new Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting mandate that SEBI (the Securities and Exchange Board of India) is introducing next year. Ninety five early voluntary filings from some leading Indian public companies listed on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) had been made a couple of weeks ago. From those filings we were able to pull together a range of analytics.
Examining this early data, two things are quickly apparent. First, the data is immediately useful, with dozens of trends and insights clearly noticeable. Second, like any new data set, analysis shows that there are a range of areas that will benefit from improvements to data quality rules and issuer guidance. For example, companies are not currently required to ensure that waste disposal and waste recycled should add up to the level of waste generated.
How is it done? It’s very straightforward. Our Guidance Manager, Revathy Ramanan, converted the XBRL downloaded from the NSE into xBRL-JSON, using a piece of Certified XBRL Software. She then imported those files it into an off the shelf analytics tool. For this example we are using Tableau, but it could have been any JSON-aware tool including MS Office 365. Pulling together relevant charts and analytics involves some domain knowledge, but is a rapid process.
Inspired? We hope you’ll find these kinds of analytics helpful and that many more organisations will use these techniques to discover insights in their own environments, using relevant XBRL data.
Explore the data yourself here. Note that in this version we are limiting the level of drill-down for the moment.
