Integrated Reporting in India: Research Findings and Insights

Even though there has been a growing importance of integrated reporting globally but there has been limited research conducted with respect to IR in India. Hence the study investigated the extent to which the companies in India are integrating financial and non-financial data in their reporting. It employed Longitudinal Qualitative Document Analysis for the period 2010–2016 using an Integrated Reporting Index (IRI) in examining annual reports of 102 most valuable companies ranked on the basis of market capitalization. Based on the score range of 100–0 being the maximum and minimum respectively, the study revealed an average IRI of 70%. We observed that governance and performance were the two most well reported content elements throughout. In contrast information about business model was the least reported content element. We observed that financial and human capital were the two most well reported capital form disclosed by the companies and the two least reported ones were manufactured and intellectual capital. From our study we observed that the selected companies fell into four levels of integration i.e. high integration, low integration, progressive integration and moderate integration. 38.24% of the companies fell into the category of high integration and 26.47% of the companies fell into the category of low integration. Hence Indian companies are nearly well equipped to adopt and implement “integrated reporting” as required by the IIRC framework but preparation of “Integrated Report” needs its promotion amongst such companies in the Indian context so that it encourages them to step forward and adopt this method of reporting.