Finding 02 · Disclosure · FY2025-26
Net-zero targets without Scope 3 numbers
Five Nifty-50 companies state net-zero targets in FY2025-26 filings whose Scope 3 table is either absent or filed blank. Under BRSR rules, Scope 3 disclosure is voluntary — so this is a gap between ambition and measurement, not a compliance failure. The five cases differ in instructive ways, so each is named precisely.
Five patterns, precisely stated
Power Grid Corporation
"Net zero emission organisation by 2047"
Target scope not stated. Zero occurrences of "Scope 3" in the filing's 133,546 extracted characters. Scope 1 and 2 reported; no Scope 3 value filed.
Tata Consumer Products
"Net Zero by 2040 across all geographies"
Target scope not stated; zero "Scope 3" occurrences. Fairness note: the same filing separately — and correctly — scopes its achieved "carbon neutrality" claim to Scopes 1 and 2. This finding concerns only the unscoped 2040 target.
Bharat Electronics
"Net Zero Carbon Emissions by 2035… covering all three Scopes"
The most ambitious and the most transparent: the target explicitly includes Scope 3 — and the Scope 3 table in the same filing reads "Assessment will be taken up." The nearest target date of the five, with its largest emissions category not yet measured, stated by the company itself.
Reliance Industries
"Net Carbon Zero by 2035"
Stated five times across the filing, never once paired with a scope qualifier. Its Scope 3 question is answered with a bare "-" — genuinely blank, not merely missing from the machine-readable file.
Nestlé India
"Net-Zero emissions by 2050"
Its Scope 3 table reads "-" for both FY2025-26 and FY2024-25. Nuance flagged, not glossed over: the machine-readable filing tags this same field as a literal "0," not absent — the PDF's dashed cell is the more reliable source. Reported here as no value disclosed, never as a claimed zero.
Two false positives our method caught — two different causes
Tata Motors (PV) shows the same machine-readable pattern — extensive net-zero language, no Scope 3 value in XBRL. But its PDF contains a full Scope 3 table with category-level breakdowns. The XBRL blank is a filing-completeness gap, not a disclosure gap; Tata Motors is excluded.
Bharti Airtel is excluded for a structurally different reason. A dimensional section of its own XBRL filing — a per-Principle breakdown our census scan doesn't read, since it only scans the main consolidated text — states a Scope 3 reduction target and a reported figure, even though the structured numeric table marks Scope 3 "not applicable." Neither string appears anywhere in Airtel's own PDF, so that figure is not published here as fact — but its mere presence in Airtel's own regulatory filing is enough to disqualify the company from a "states net-zero, discloses no Scope 3" claim, since that framing would contradict Airtel's own XBRL text. Both exclusions are published deliberately, as documentation of the verification method: machine-readable absence alone is never treated as non-disclosure here.
Definitions
Scope 3 emissions occur in a company's value chain and are, for most companies, the largest share of total emissions. BRSR is SEBI's mandatory sustainability disclosure for India's top 1,000 listed companies; its "Essential" indicators are mandatory, its "Leadership" indicators — including total Scope 3 — are voluntary. Major net-zero frameworks (e.g. the Science Based Targets initiative) require value-chain coverage for a corporate net-zero claim.
FAQ
Are these companies breaking any rule?
No. Scope 3 disclosure is voluntary under BRSR, and all five filings appear compliant. The finding is about the distance between a stated net-zero ambition and the measurement disclosed alongside it.
Is this greenwashing?
We don't use that word, and this finding doesn't support it. A net-zero target without a Scope 3 baseline is a target whose largest component is unmeasured — a factual gap each company could close in one filing cycle, by publishing an estimate or scoping its target explicitly.