Indian corporate environmental and financial performance: empirical relationship between them

Conventional wisdom suggests that there is a conflict between the goals of environmental protection and economic competitiveness. But proactive industry leaders argue that this is not true as long as state policy creates a level playing field. In fact, certain progressive firms have adopted state of the art technologies for pollution abatement without bothering for the return on investments. On the other hand, industrial segments that are lagging behind in environmental performance do not feel any public pressure to improve. It is believe that the corporate world understands financial language much better than the legal or the environmental language. Therefore, it was thought prudent to make a study to understand the relationship between Environmental and Financial Performance of companies. The present article, after considering the green rating done by the Center of Science and Environment has examined the relationship between the Environmental and Financial performance of these companies. The empirical analysis with limited data available, however, failed to establish direct relationship between the two. However, it gave insight to various environmental parameters and the direction for future research in the field.