Your customer sent you an ESG questionnaire and there is nobody here to answer it.

What landed in your inbox

A customer you have supplied for years sends a spreadsheet. It asks for your Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, your energy intensity per unit, your water withdrawal, your workforce split by gender and contract type, your grievance mechanism, and whether you have a supplier code of conduct. There is a deadline on it. There is a sentence about it being a condition of continued supply.

Nobody in your business has ever produced any of this, there is no sustainability function, and the person the email landed on already has a job. That is the actual situation this page is about.

The useful first move is not to start measuring things. It is to find out where the request comes from, because the answer changes how much of the spreadsheet you actually have to fill in and how defensible each answer has to be.

Where the pressure really comes from

There are three separate sources and they are routinely confused with each other, including by the people sending the questionnaires.

1. Your listed customer’s own reporting

Listed Indian companies report against SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report format, and a subset of that — BRSR Core — carries assurance requirements that have been extending down the market-capitalisation table over successive financial years. Part of the framework asks them about their value chain: upstream and downstream partners individually at 2% or more of purchases or sales by value, with disclosure limitable to 75% of purchases and sales.

That is you. And here is the part almost nobody sending you a questionnaire will mention:

2. Your customer’s own customers, and their codes

A great deal of supplier ESG pressure is not regulatory at all. It is a multinational buyer’s procurement policy, or a corporate sustainability commitment somebody made publicly and now has to evidence. These are contractual and they are real: losing the account is a genuine consequence even where no statute is involved.

3. CBAM, which is the one with a price on it

The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its definitive period on 1 January 2026. CBAM obligations fall on the EU importer, not on the Indian supplier. What reaches the supplier is the consequence: without verified product-level emissions data the importer falls back on default values set at the high end of the sector range, and the shipment prices worse than a competitor who supplied the figures.

What the spreadsheet actually asks for

Strip the branding off and supplier questionnaires converge on the same handful of things. It is a much shorter list than the document length suggests.

• Energy. Electricity units and fuel consumed, per site, over a stated period. From bills, not estimates.
• Intensity. That energy, or the emissions derived from it, divided by something you produce. Per tonne, per unit, per order. Buyers ask for intensity because totals are not comparable between suppliers of different sizes.
• Water and waste. Drawn, discharged, generated, disposed. Often only where metered.
• Workforce. Permanent and contract headcount, split by gender, plus turnover and training hours.
• Policies. Health and safety, anti-corruption, grievance redressal, non-discrimination, supplier conduct.
• Incidents. What went wrong and what you did about it.

The cost of doing nothing, and of overreacting

Both failure modes are common, and the second one is more expensive for a mid-size supplier than anybody admits.

Doing nothing risks the account, and it risks it quietly: procurement does not usually announce that you have been moved to a secondary list. If you export covered goods to the EU, doing nothing also has a direct price, because your importer prices your shipment against default values rather than your real figures.

Overreacting means buying a full ESG programme, software and an assurance engagement to answer a questionnaire that asked for twelve months of electricity bills. We have watched businesses spend more on a sustainability platform than the account was worth. The regulatory pressure on you is, at the moment, voluntary at its source; the commercial pressure is real but it is usually satisfied by an honest, sourced, partial answer delivered on time.

Could you answer it today?

Eight questions, in the browser, nothing submitted. It separates what you already hold from what you would have to build, and puts the second list in an order.

The checklist, yours to keep

The whole thing as a working document: what to ask the buyer before you spend anything, which numbers to pull, which policies to write, and what to do differently if you export into the EU.

The first section is deliberately about interrogating the request rather than answering it. That is the part that saves the money.

What we do, if you want help

We are not an ESG consultancy and we are not going to pretend to be one. We have no assurance practice, we do not issue verified emissions figures, and where a buyer needs assured numbers you need a firm that can sign them.

What we are good at is the part that is a data problem:

• Getting twelve months of energy, production, water and workforce data out of the places it currently lives — bills, payroll, the ERP, three spreadsheets — and into one sourced sheet.
• Building the intensity figures from it, with the arithmetic visible so somebody can check it rather than trust it.
• Turning the answer sheet into something that survives to next quarter: one owner, one place, dated sources.
• Being honest with you about which parts of the questionnaire you should push back on.

The price

There is no packaged product on this page, and we are not going to invent one to have something to sell you. What there is instead is the studio’s ordinary engagement ladder, published, and the same for everybody.

If the honest answer after the call is that you do not need us yet, that is the answer you will get. Tell us what you are dealing with, or get in touch.

Where to read more

The sources at the bottom of this page are the primary ones and they are worth more than any summary, ours included. Alongside them:

• DPDP readiness— the other disclosure regime reaching Indian businesses, and the one that is not voluntary.
• Continuity readiness — supplier questionnaires increasingly ask about business continuity too, and that section is answerable this month.
• Our research series— long-form and cited, and it labels every number as measured, assumed or unknown. We have no published ESG paper yet; when there is one it will appear beside this page automatically.
• ERP systems— because the reason these numbers are hard to produce is usually that they live in six places.

Sources