The second report card

The Indian pulp and paper sector achieves an overall score of 29.1 per cent. It gets the Two Leaves Award for the environmental performance of its life cycle – from sourcing of raw material, to processing of the product and to disposal of effluents. In addition, the Green Rating Project (GRP) has assessed the corporate policy and management systems of each company and has given cognisance to the perceptions of local communities who live around each factory. As the sector average in the first green rating (1999), was 27.4 per cent it could be argued that the sector has not really improved its performance. But this is not the case. GRP has considerably tightened its rating benchmarks and if the old rating scoresheet is used then the sector’s performance would increase by 10-15 per cent. This time, ITC Ltd.-Bhadrachalam Unit is on the top, displacing last time winner JK Paper Mills to second place. The big losers are the Andhra Pradesh Paper Mills – slipping from 2nd position to 11th position and BILT-Ballarpur Unit, which has dropped from the 3rd place to rank 13th.