Summary: The article uses the IPL’s Green Dot Ball Pledge as a case study to highlight concerns over greenwashing and the lack of ESG accountability in India. Under the initiative, BCCI and the Tata Group pledged to plant trees for every dot ball bowled during IPL matches, but questions remain regarding the location, survival, verification, and environmental impact of these plantations. The author argues that despite extensive publicity, there is no publicly available audit, third-party certification, or verifiable evidence supporting the claimed environmental benefits. This reflects a broader issue where corporations make sustainability commitments without adequate accountability. The article notes that India lacks a comprehensive legal framework to regulate greenwashing, with ESG oversight fragmented among multiple regulators and disclosure requirements largely focused on reporting rather than verification. Comparing India with stricter global frameworks, the author advocates reforms including a statutory definition of greenwashing, mandatory third-party ESG audits, stronger regulatory oversight, and penalties for misleading sustainability claims to ensure genuine ESG compliance.
The Promise and The Problem
In 2023, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), in collaboration with the Tata Group, launched the Green Dot Ball Pledge. The initiative promised that for every dot ball bowled in the playoff stage, 500 trees would be planted. Later, in 2025, this was extended to 19 trees for every dot ball bowled during the league stage of the tournament. This move was publicly applauded as it encouraged environmental consciousness, especially considering each match in the Indian Premier League (IPL) emits around 10,000 – 14,000 tCO2e, which would take tropical forests the size of Singapore over a whole year to absorb these emissions.
However, as applause begins to fade away, a few questions still linger. Where exactly are these trees planted? How many survive the next monsoon? How much have they contributed to the offset of carbon emissions? In the absence of a public audit or verified location and third-party certification, there have been three completed IPL seasons and massive advertising throughout the stadiums and broadcasts. Still, there is no actual proof of planation, the only update remains in the form of numbers displayed on the official website. This gap between promise and performance in the IPL is not unique to cricket; rather, this is a clear example of the corporate world’s greenwashing.
This blog uses the IPL Green Dot Ball pledge as a case study to examine the legal vacuum surrounding Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) accountability in India. The author argues that Indian corporate law currently lacks an appropriate, enforceable ESG regulatory and legal framework, thereby enabling symbolic acts to masquerade as sustainable leadership.
Greenwashing 101
Greenwashing is a term coined in the 1980s by environmentalist Jay Westerveld, who indignantly protested against hotel groups for promoting towel reuse as conservation while pursuing ecologically disastrous expansion. Greenwashing essentially allows companies to maintain a reputation while pursuing a business model that is ultimately unsustainable. This practice can be observed in Indian markets with examples such as Coco Cola who pledged to become “water neutral”, but 11 years later they still have 99% of its water footprint to go. Similarly, despite pledging to turn carbon negative, the Adani Group simultaneously doubled its coal-fired power capacity to 24 gigawatts. In both cases, the pledge existed; the press existed; the proof did not. Further, an empirical study of NIFTY 50 companies found that 47% exhibited greenwashing characteristics. The IPL’s Green Dot Ball Pledge, examined below, reflects precisely this tendency, deploying the language of sustainability without the accountability structures that would make such claims verifiable or meaningful.
The Green Dot Ball Pledge
The IPL’s Green Dot Ball Pledge appears to fit within this broader pattern of corporate greenwashing. As the BCCI and the Tata Group garner appreciation for their tree-planting efforts, there remains no proof of such a plantation drive. As per IPL dot ball statistics, the public pledge of the BCCI should ideally reflect the planting of more than 500,000 trees.
This goal could, in principle, be achieved in one of two ways: either through direct planting at specific locations or by buying carbon credits. With the magnitude of this undertaking, any major tree-planting campaign with hundreds of thousands of saplings would have certainly generated extensive public interest, media reports, or at least several formal announcements throughout online channels. However, due to a lack of any such tree planting reporting or third-party authentication and given that the corporations increasingly rely on carbon-offsetting, it would be reasonable to assume that the initiative has been implemented through carbon credit purchases.
This raises serious legal and environmental concerns. While, on paper, it may appear that thousands of trees are being planted, in reality, these “trees” often exist only as carbon credits transactions recorded in a ledger rather than saplings rooted in the ground. Such credits come from plans that don’t help the environment much, or at all. To give an example, someone farming bamboo, betel palms or coconuts might register their land for carbon credits and ‘sell’ credits for planting these things in large quantities, which they were going to do anyway. In these situations, the newly planted trees might be counted for carbon purposes by the rules, but their actual effect on the ecosystem is actually worse.
The IPL pledge, therefore, shows that claiming to meet targets with numbers alone isn’t enough. Unless we know what kind of trees are being planted, how many of them are living, and how well they’ll store carbon for years to come, the scheme is more for appearances than a serious attempt to help the environment.
India’s ESG Framework: Disclosure Without Enforcement
While green claims are increasingly becoming part of corporate branding, Indian law has not evolved to match this shift. To begin with, there is no statutory definition of greenwashing. A limited reliance can be placed on circular of SEBI, which gives a general definition while also acknowledging that there is no universally accepted taxonomy on greenwashing. An absence of legislator definition makes it really difficult to challenge misleading ESG claims. To address greenwashing with more clarity SEBI followed this circular with two more (2nd,3rd). While important, these circulars were confined primarily to green securities issuance rather than broader ESG communication, consequently allowing campaigns such as the IPL’s Green Dot Ball Pledge to remain outside of its purview. Further, while Section 17 of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the Advertising Standards Council of India guidelines address misleading advertisements, their scope is primarily limited to product-level consumer ads rather than corporate-level sustainability claims.
Additionally, ESG disclosure mechanisms in India, such as SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) does not mandate any specific standards, and mandatory third-party assurance only covers a limited scope of BRSR Core metrics. Further, there is no requirement for full third-party audits, no common framework for impact verification, and, importantly, no clear penalties for false ESG claims.
Moreover, ESG oversight in India is fragmented across multiple regulators. SEBI regulates disclosures for listed companies, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs governs corporate social responsibility under the Companies Act, and the Central Consumer Protection Authority looks at consumer advertising. But no single authority has the mandate or authority to audit, investigate, and sanction ESG-related misreporting across the board. This fragmented structure creates gaps, which allows companies to tailor their ESG narratives differently for different audiences without fear of contradiction or penalty.
This legal and regulatory development in India today, stands in sharp contrast to regulatory trends around the globe. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive mandates standardised, auditable ESG reporting with clear liability for misstatements. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides set enforceable standards for environmental advertising, ensuring that claims must be specific, substantiated, and not misleading. India, by comparison, is still operating in a voluntary disclosure paradigm, with scattered regulatory responses and no clear enforcement backbone.
Way Forward To ESG Accountability
It is only through legally enforceable guidelines that India’s rhetorical disclosures on ESG would mean anything. While SEBI has defined greenwashing through a circular, there is no established understanding of relative terms like unsubstantiated, or misleading. A legislator’s redefinition of greenwashing should be the first step of a larger reform. It should either be included in Section 447 of the Companies Act, which penalises corporate fraud involving deception or concealment of a material fact, or SEBI could include it in their LODR norms, thereby treating misleading ESG disclosures as securities-market violations rather than mere reputational concerns. Further, ESG should only be claimed after third-party assurance through phased ESG audits similar to the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive compliance. Such audits should be imposed by the National Financial Reporting Authority or by the SEBI-approved ESG auditors. This would ensure that cosmetic ESG disclosures would not be made. To tackle regulatory discrepancies, India could either implement a unified ESG regulator or increase the authority of the SEBI to provide obligatory reporting, approve ESG auditors, create and maintain a public register of ESG auditors, and penalise those that break the rules. The penalty system should ideally include the disqualification of Directors, fines on turnover, suspension of tax or CSR exemptions, and bans from public tenders. Without these reforms, ESG will be nothing more than a branding exercise and will always lack a governance standard.
Conclusion
The IPL Green Dot Ball Promise underscores the gap between India’s growing ESG commitments and the actual state of its legal framework. In order to change this narrative, India needs to solidify its ESG commitments through legal frameworks. An ideal start would be to establish a definition of greenwashing, strengthening one regulator, certifying third-party assurances, and instituting actual penalties for violations are all necessary improvements. Only after these reforms will we see the actual effects of environmental initiatives by corporate else they will conveniently hide behind this abstract and scattered regulation and continue to earn goodwill.
Refrence Links:
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