Thinking · Obligation

Head office has a climate-health mandate. The India arm has to answer it.

Abhijith Magal L · 31 July 2026 · 8 min read

The email is familiar enough to be a genre. It comes from group sustainability or global EHS, it references a parent-level commitment, it asks the India entity to confirm how climate-related health risks to employees and the value chain are being identified and managed, and it carries a date. Somewhere below that date sits an assurance process nobody in the India office designed.

What usually goes back is a summary of what the India team has been doing. Heat awareness sessions before summer. Hydration points at the plant. A health camp series through the CSR budget. Ambulance tie-ups in two districts. All real, often genuinely good work, none of it an answer to what was asked.

What does a global climate-health mandate actually ask an India arm for?

Four things, in most versions I have seen. Evidence that climate-related health risks to the workforce have been identified. The same for the value chain, which means contractors, distributors and the last mile. A stated response with owners and dates. And numbers capable of surviving a third party who is paid to be sceptical. The first can be answered informally. The rest need measurement that most India entities have never been asked to build.

Read down the middle column. Every entry is true, defensible and worth doing. Not one of them tells a parent company how exposed the India business is, which is the only thing the mandate is actually trying to establish.

Why the activity answer keeps getting sent

Because activity is what the India entity has records of. CSR spend is tracked to the rupee under Section 135, which requires qualifying companies to spend two per cent of average net profits and to report against it. EHS logs training hours. Both systems are mature, audited and easy to export. Exposure has no equivalent system. Nobody owns the question of how much heat costs the business in lost hours, or which distribution route fails first in a bad monsoon, so nobody has been building the dataset that answers it.

The national picture makes the size of that blind spot visible. India lost an estimated 247 billion potential labour hours to heat in 2024, worth around USD 194 billion, roughly ₹18.5 lakh crore, according to the Lancet Countdown. Every one of those hours was lost inside somebody's operation. Almost none of them appear in anybody's report. We took those figures apart one by one in the Lancet Countdown in operating terms.

Activity says what you did. A mandate asks what you are exposed to. Only one of those survives an assurer.

The four obligations that actually move budget

Climate-health work in India rarely gets funded because someone found the science persuasive. It gets funded when it attaches to an obligation that already exists and already has money behind it.

• Section 135The CSR obligation is already spent every year. The question is whether that spend is climate-aware enough to defend when outcomes dip in a bad season, or whether it looks like money placed where the weather will erode it.
• The parent mandateA commitment made at group level becomes a data request at entity level. India is frequently the arm with the highest physical exposure and the thinnest measurement, which is an uncomfortable pairing when the deadline lands.
• Duty of careHeat, air quality and flooding reach workers, contractors and field forces directly. Duty-of-care standards are written globally and tested locally, and the test is what you measured before something happened.
• The BRSR clockReasonable assurance of BRSR Core extends from the top 500 listed companies to the top 1,000 from FY2026-27 under SEBI's existing circular. Several hundred more companies are about to have their employee wellbeing and value-chain claims tested by someone external.

None of these require anyone to accept a thesis about climate and health. They require an answer by a date. Our regulations and standards library sets out what each one asks for in its own words.

What a defensible answer contains

Five elements, and they are less work than they sound because most of the raw material already sits in systems the company owns.

A stated method, so the numbers can be reproduced next year and the year after. A baseline, even a rough one, because a first measurement that admits its own limits beats an estimate presented as fact. Exposure ranked rather than listed, so the response has an order and the order has a reason. Interventions tied to the ranking, which is what converts a health camp from an activity into a control. And an owner with a review date, since the most common failure in assurance is not a wrong number but an unowned one.

What that produces is a short document a group function can read without translation, and an assurer can test without a fight. It also tends to be the first time anyone in the India business has seen its own climate exposure written down in one place, which changes internal conversations faster than any external requirement does.

The gap this all sits in

Across the FY2024-25 BRSR disclosures of 59 listed Indian companies, the pattern holds with unusual consistency: climate risk is written up as an emissions and asset question, health appears as a benefits and safety question, and the space between them belongs to nobody. That space is where a parent mandate lands, and it is why the reply so often has to be assembled from whatever is nearest to hand. The full argument sits in climate change is a healthcare story.

The objection worth taking seriously

The most common pushback is that this is already covered in the group submission, so the India entity does not need its own view. Group-level aggregation is exactly what makes the India exposure disappear. A global average across sites in Europe, North America and Asia will not surface a distribution network that stops for ten days in a monsoon or a field force losing hours to heat every summer. When assurance moves from group narrative to entity evidence, and it is moving, the arm with the highest exposure and the least measurement is the one that gets asked twice.

The second objection is timing: this year's report is already drafted, so it can wait. It can. The cost of waiting is that next year's answer will be assembled in the same rush, from the same activity records, and the baseline that would have made the year after easy still will not exist.

Start where the deadline is

Whichever of the four obligations has the nearest date is the right entry point. It does not matter whether the trigger is a CSR review, a parent questionnaire, a worker safety standard or an assurance letter. They all end up needing the same underlying thing: a measured view of where climate is already reaching your people, your patients and your supply chain. Build it once and it answers all four, in whatever language each of them prefers.

Abhijith Magal L

Founder, Syntropy Earth. Nine years across two global pharmaceutical multinationals in patient access and commercial roles, with health-equity work alongside the WHO-Foundation and UNICEF. He works on climate-access: where climate disruption breaks the link between patients and care.

Last updated: 31 July 2026