Materiality Assessment for Beginners

Who this is for

Someone starting ESG reporting who's been told to "do a materiality assessment first" and isn't sure what that actually involves in practice.

Plain explanation

Not every ESG issue is equally relevant to every company. A data center cares enormously about energy use and barely at all about water discharge. A textile dyeing unit is the opposite. Materiality is simply the process of identifying which issues are significant enough for your specific business to measure, manage, and report — rather than working through a generic checklist that treats everything as equally important.

There are two common lenses used together, sometimes called double materiality:

• Financial materiality — could this issue affect your company's financial performance? (e.g., water scarcity raising your operating costs, a safety incident triggering fines or lost contracts.)
• Impact materiality — does your company's activity meaningfully affect the world outside it? (e.g., your factory's emissions affecting local air quality, regardless of whether that costs you money directly.)

An issue can be material through either lens, or both. A beginner's assessment doesn't need to formally separate the two — the practical goal is the same either way: a short, defensible list of the issues that matter most for your business.

India specifics

BRSR's structure already does some of this work for you: its 9 NGRBC principles (see our plain-English guide) cover the full range of ESG topics a regulator considers relevant. Your materiality assessment doesn't need to invent categories from scratch — it can start by asking, for each of the 9 principles, "how relevant is this to us, specifically?"

For companies just starting out — especially SMEs without a dedicated sustainability team — a lightweight, informal materiality assessment is far more useful than no assessment at all. You don't need a formal stakeholder survey or workshop to get real value from the exercise; even an honest internal conversation among a handful of people who understand the business will surface the obvious priorities.

Worked example

A logistics company runs through a simple materiality exercise with its founder, operations head, and HR lead. They list out the 9 NGRBC principles and rate each one, quickly, as High / Medium / Low relevance:

• Environment (Principle 6): High — fuel consumption is a major cost and emissions source for a trucking fleet.
• Employee well-being (Principle 3): High — driver safety and working hours are core to the business and its risk exposure.
• Consumer responsibility (Principle 9): Medium — delivery damage complaints matter, but the business isn't consumer-facing at scale.
• Public policy engagement (Principle 7): Low — the company doesn't lobby or engage in policy discussions.

In under an hour, they have a defensible starting list: focus first on fuel/emissions data and driver safety, treat consumer complaints as secondary, and don't spend scarce time building out a public-policy disclosure nobody asked for.

Checklist

• List the 9 NGRBC principles (or your relevant framework's categories) as your starting menu, not a blank page.
• Rate each one's relevance to your specific business — High/Medium/Low is enough for a first pass.
• Involve more than one person; a single perspective tends to miss blind spots.
• Prioritize data collection around your High-relevance issues first — don't try to measure everything simultaneously.
• Revisit the assessment periodically; what's material can shift as your business, customers, or regulations change.

What to do next

Use the 9 NGRBC principles as your starting checklist for the exercise above.

---

Current as of: 22 July 2026. Materiality methodology is a widely used concept across GRI, BRSR, and other frameworks, not a single regulated procedure — treat this as a practical starting approach, not a compliance requirement with a fixed format.

Sources:

• GRI — Materiality
• PwC India — Navigating India's transition to sustainability reporting