BRSR Core vs BRSR Lite

A mid-cap company preparing its annual disclosures this year runs into two unfamiliar terms: BRSR Core and BRSR Lite. Both sound like variations of the same report, but they serve different companies, carry different obligations, and sit in different parts of India's ESG reporting architecture.

This distinction matters now because BRSR Core's phased rollout has moved past the largest listed companies and is reaching further into the mid-cap segment. From FY 2025-26, the top 500 listed companies by market capitalisation must comply with BRSR Core, a threshold that catches a meaningful number of mid-sized firms for the first time.

This article explains what separates BRSR Core from BRSR Lite, where mid-cap companies stand in the phase-in timeline, and what to do if your company falls just outside the mandatory cohort.

BRSR, or Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report, is SEBI's ESG disclosure format for listed companies, replacing the earlier Business Responsibility Report in 2021. In 2023, SEBI introduced BRSR Core, a smaller, more rigorous subset of nine ESG attributes covering emissions, water, waste, energy, workforce wellbeing, and governance, that companies must report with assurance rather than simple self-disclosure. Assurance means an independent third party checks the underlying data, which is a stricter requirement than BRSR's original self-reported format.

BRSR Lite comes from a different track altogether. It emerged from a Ministry of Corporate Affairs committee recommendation that smaller, unlisted companies be offered a simplified, voluntary version of the BRSR format, rather than the full listed-company disclosure. Where BRSR Core narrows down what large listed companies must assure, BRSR Lite widens ESG reporting outward to companies that have no SEBI obligation to report at all. The two formats were never designed to compete with each other; they address opposite ends of company size and listing status.

BRSR Core and BRSR Lite address different populations of companies rather than offering two versions of the same choice. BRSR Core is the mandatory, assurance-backed obligation expanding toward India's top 1,000 listed companies, while BRSR Lite is a voluntary, simplified option aimed at smaller, unlisted businesses.

For mid-cap companies, the practical task is tracking where your market-cap ranking sits against BRSR Core's expanding threshold each year, since that determines when the more rigorous obligation arrives.