At the soul of ESG reporting data is sentiment which reflects the meta performance of an entity, its workings at the scale of a number, which can be benchmarked and compared. The comparison triggers change towards achieving targets, which will be measured in the next cycle.

I have been attributed to coining two terms which have been published and cited, being a non PhD so far it has been deeply gratifying:

‘Desi Khaleeji’ – encapsulates the lived experience of generations of south Asians in the Gulf who feel at home in Dubai rather than passport address back in South Asia. I published an essay on this topic in a creative-critical book published by Swalif Publishing in Abu Dhabi. The term has been debated and vociferously critiqued in webinars by significant gulf watchers.

‘Hindu Nationalist Intellectual Architecture’ was a term I introduced in a column for The Tilak Chronicle with whom I was a weekly contributor for a year. The term was picked up by Dr Sanjaya Baru for his book , The New Indian Power Elite, and I have a citation there.

For a person who was deemed to be a person unfit for a scholarship once upon a time by a certain supervisor, two concepts for a writer, if not a pretentious scholar is a contribution to the discourse none the less.

Fascinating talk which was illuminating as came to know that south Asians comprised of one third the population of Mecca on the eve of the First World War and that Indian Independence Stalwart Azad was born in Mecca to an Arab mother in the year 1888. I would like to know how many Arabs lived in Bombay, Karachi and Calcutta in the same time period.

Mapping Human Rights Risks amongst the ESG landscape is an opportunity to operationalize dignity in the value chains, where salaries are paid in time, proper facilities are provided and any at risk employees are provided adequate tools to be offered a safety net as a normal worker. Context is again imperative in such complex journeys.

Human Rights obligations for business has been mainstream for the readymade garments sector for a while, and for the palm oil and electronics value chains globally as migrant labor has been a source of manpower for decades across internal and external migration corridors.

Mining and O&G have had stakeholder engagement before their projects and HRIAs have been commissioned specifically. With the advent of ESG as a metanarrative, human rights as dignity and care are operationalized in a quotidian level. Human Rights risks for the technology sector would be different to a resource extractive sector, and that context matters. Global human rights risk obligations stitch local risks in a networked fashion and elevate it to international registers.

At the core of the craft of consulting is solid research, on practical issues which enable managers to do their work better. Like academia, but different as the ends are not the politics of h-index. Both feed off each other. Professional services create value in their very elegance, and in their nadir a copy-paste machine.

Human rights from a corporate perspective from the lens of the global south is a matter of vendor compliance in adherence to EU CSRD and a plethora of emergent legislation’s. The compliance is normally enterprise level and tier 2 vendors at the maximum yet the rot lies hidden from the audit gaze. In the era of activist transparency, human rights needs to be deeper with greater vendor accountability through long term interventions, in a cross stakeholder fashion to bring out tangible change which ultimately can be reported. Unlike carbon, human rights compliance is an everyday operational affair. Good health and safety is human rights as well, and Eurocentric moorings of human rights can be incorporated into local registers of understanding, as good work makes for motivated employees and charged millennial end users.

There is a business case for going beyond compliance for human rights. If the civil society can find loop holes being bottom up, the corporations can do the same in a collaborative approach. Imagination and intention solves problems.

#healthandsafety #humanrights #compliance #work #audit #business #change

Human rights from a corporate perspective from the lens of the global south is a matter of vendor compliance in adherence to EU CSRD and a plethora of emergent legislation’s. The compliance is normally enterprise level and tier 2 vendors at the maximum yet the rot lies hidden from the audit gaze. In the era of activist transparency, human rights needs to be deeper with greater vendor accountability through long term interventions, in a cross stakeholder fashion to bring out tangible change which ultimately can be reported. Unlike carbon, human rights compliance is an everyday operational affair. Good health and safety is human rights as well, and Eurocentric moorings of human rights can be incorporated into local registers of understanding, as good work makes for motivated employees and charged millennial end users.

There is a business case for going beyond compliance for human rights. If the civil society can find loop holes being bottom up, the corporations can do the same in a collaborative approach. Imagination and intention solves problems.

#healthandsafety #humanrights #compliance #work #audit #business #change