Championing human rights for sustainable growth

Recognising and promoting human rights is an intrinsic feature of good corporate citizenship. Truly humane companies go beyond the mandate of law and develop clear roadmaps to achieve ethical, inclusive and sustainable growth over the long term.

Aditya Birla Group has always believed that sustainable business models lead to a better world. The Group is a strident advocate for human rights and dignity in the 36 countries where it has a presence. The company’s commitment to human rights is chronicled in a Group-wide Sustainable Business Framework aligned to multiple international standards, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Aditya Birla Group’s Human Rights Management Standard applies to customers, employees, local communities, contractors, suppliers, and other stakeholders, and it has three core requirements.

Promulgating a Human Rights Policy

One of Aditya Birla Group’s first priorities under its new Standard was to develop a Group-wide Human Rights Policy. The Policy draws from internationally recognised frameworks as well as the Group’s own expertise and vision.

The Group Human Rights Policy lays out progressive steps to ensure that the Group, and its companies, respect human rights and avoid involvement in human rights abuses of any kind. It also provides a clearly-defined system to identify, assess and minimise potential adverse impacts caused – directly or indirectly – by a business’s operations.

In addition, the Group’s Human Rights Policy contains provisions related to human rights due diligence and the effective resolution of stakeholder grievances.

Conducting human rights due diligence

Monitoring human rights impacts on employees, suppliers, contractors, customers, or communities at work sites is a huge task. To make this task transparent, simple, and effective, Aditya Birla Group has developed a Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) tool in-house.

The HRDD tool is used at different Group company sites, where selected teams of employees are tasked with answering the tool. The HRDD the tool ensures that site managers become mindful about the risks of potential human rights abuse at their site, within contractor activities on-site, and within the supply chain or value chain.

HRDD also enables sites to identify gaps in their existing systems and processes thus giving opportunity to further improve. Appropriate mitigation plans can then be developed for the salient human rights, and these plans are reviewed by the company’s senior management for successful implementation.

Aditya Birla Group’s HRDD tool references several international documents for mapping rights and abuses. These documents include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, among others.

A few of the Group businesses are ahead in this journey. Gaps have been identified within the supply chain in terms of the company’s awareness on the performance of supplier in human rights management. Projects are initiated to improve awareness on human rights management within the supply chain, work with the suppliers for their capacity building, developing systems for conformance to the existing legal framework and minimise chances of human rights violation.

Providing a mechanism for remedy

The third requirement of the Group’s Human Rights Standard is having a transparent and effective redressal mechanism. While Aditya Birla Group companies are committed to minimising the human rights impacts of their businesses, an effective grievance management mechanism ensures that any concerns are addressed in a timely and appropriate manner. Accordingly, all businesses within the Group have set up grievance management mechanisms for their stakeholders.

The Group and its companies also ensure that the grievance redressal mechanisms, besides being robust, are perceived as credible by their stakeholders. Grievance redressal and closure is monitored at the site, business, and at the group level so that the response is timely and apt.

By backing its commitment to human rights with a robust policy, tools and redressal mechanisms, Aditya Birla Group remains an exemplar of progressive and people-friendly business practices.