Greening the Supply Chain Through CSR: A Model for Assessing Sustainability Using Fuzzy-Based PPP Approach

Abstract

Climate change and global warming have hit the boardrooms of corporations more than ever before. Sustainability indices have become important criteria in today’s parlance to assess the risk of investing or collaborating with any company as part of their supply chain strategy. Many international firms provide these indices used by corporations to assess sustainability and collaborate. In a competing scenario, there is a need for companies in developing economies like India to be on par with their counterparts across the world by obtaining good sustainability scores. Towards this, one of the measures the Government in India has taken is mandating transparency in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting through The Companies Act 2013. Since then large amounts of money that have been spent in specific areas have been reported towards achieving the societal needs and as part of that towards greening the supply chain. Using data obtained from the annual reports of NIFTY indexed companies, this paper develops a fuzzy-logic-based model to obtain a sustainability score for companies. The inputs used in the model deal with the triple bottom line criteria—Profit, People and Planet (PPP). Using fuzzy logic, rules have been created that define sustainability. This chapter also discusses the patterns in the sustainability scores obtained with respect to the NIFTY indexed companies.