M&M’s Strategic Sourcing Unit is working towards creating a more responsible sourcing ecosystem through trainings, monitoring, and reporting.

As part of the planet positive sustainability strategy for Mahindra, engaging stakeholders, including suppliers, is a key part of our decarbonisation strategy. To that end, M&M’s Strategic Sourcing Unit is working towards creating a more responsible sourcing ecosystem through dedicated capability building for its value chain partners.

M&M has initiated the implementation of SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) Core requirements mandated by SEBI last year. Since the regulator’s official communication in July 2023, the SSU team has been actively engaging with our top suppliers, accounting for 75% of our purchase value. The team has also developed a detailed implementation roadmap to meet the disclosure reporting deadline of April 2025. A critical part of this implementation is the capability building programme, as both the suppliers and the SSU team are new to these requirements.

To address this priority, the team recently completed a rigorous capability building program on the BRSR core requirements for our upstream value chain partners. This was done in collaboration with the AFS sustainability team, HR, and EY team through nine workshops — three for SSU team and six for suppliers, across Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Mohali, and Gurgaon.

Each workshop began with opening remarks and strong nudge for action by R. Veeraraghavan, Senior Vice President, Strategic Sourcing Unit and went on to cover a wide range of topics including ESG basics, climate change and its impact, global commitments made by countries in COP21, India commitments at COP26, reporting standards and frameworks, evolution of BRSR, and its core requirements, and a demo of the ESG Compass – a digital tool for collecting, analysing, and reporting ESG data, for all 46 KPIs across 9 attributes – including energy, water, emissions, circularity, employee wellbeing & safety, gender diversity, inclusive development, fairness in engaging suppliers and customers, and openness of business.

These workshops trained 370 participants from 285 suppliers, helping the value chain partners in an elevated understanding of disclosure requirements, including – SEBI requirements, applicability, and implementation steps; input data requirements, emission factors, KPI calculation and reporting methods and importance of timely, accurate and consistent data submission.

Looking ahead, the team is now working on virtual sessions for its overseas suppliers and plans to onboard the applicable suppliers on ESG Compass to collect the data on all 46 mandated BRSR Core KPIs of 9 attributes.