Advancing Responsible Business Conduct in India: Key Insights from the capacity building workshop held with the UN Global Compact Network...

Advancing Responsible Business Conduct in India: Key Insights from the capacity building workshop held with the UN Global Compact Network India

The workshop highlighted practical challenges and lessons learned in operationalizing responsible business conduct in supply chains, especially SMEs

5 March 2026

The Responsible Business Conduct (RBC) Capacity-Building Workshop, hosted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN Global Compact Network India (UN GCNI), was held in Noida on 24 November 2025. The workshop brought together industry leaders, sustainability professionals, and practitioners committed to strengthening responsible business practices across India's manufacturing and supply-chain ecosystem.

In his opening address, Mr Ratnesh Jha, Executive Director, UN GCNI, underscored the need for Indian companies to shift from reactive compliance to proactive, systems-driven leadership amidst the expectations from regulators, investors, and global buyers rising rapidly.

He underscored that India's 65 million MSMEs - especially those in Tier 2 and Tier 3 clusters - face the greatest challenges in adopting RBC. Simplified tools, targeted handholding, and continuous capacity-building are therefore essential to help MSMEs interpret and operationalise emerging national and global standards, said Mr Jha.

Delivering the keynote address, Brig (Retd.) Rajiv Williams, Member Advisory Board, NIIT Foundation, noted that recent labour-related developments signal a major shift in India's regulatory environment. He described the four core pillars of RBC as Human Rights, Labour Rights, Environment, and Anti-Corruption, which are central to guiding enterprises through this transition.

The highlight of the second half of the workshop was panel discussion, which offered practical insights into implementing Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) in complex supply chains.

The panellists emphasized that while client expectations for traceability and concrete action continue to rise, many suppliers remain uncertain about how to begin, underscoring the critical importance of sustained capacity-building. Sharing her experience, Ms Poonam Jindgar, Vice President and Global Head-ESG & Sustainability, Birlasoft Limited, said: "During our early engagement with suppliers, many were nervous about why we were asking so many questions - but once we explained the purpose, they recognized that responsible business practices ultimately strengthen resilience and trust across the value chain."

It was highlighted that while drafting policies is relatively straightforward, embedding them into day-to-day operations is considerably challenging, especially when supply chains extend across multiple states, involve layers of subcontracting, or depend on informal labour. To address these gaps, the workshop highlighted several practical measures, including integrating human-rights clauses into purchase orders; training procurement teams to identify human rights risk indicators; conducting worker interviews; and establishing grievance mechanisms, among other actions. The workshop concluded with participants reaffirming their commitment to deepen RBC and HRDD across their organizations, recognizing these as central to building resilient, inclusive, and future-ready enterprises in India.

This workshop was held as part of the ILO's project 'Building Responsible Value Chains in Asia through the Promotion of Decent Work in Business Operations (Phase II)', funded by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan. The project aims to promote inclusive, responsible and sustainable enterprises and decent work in supply chains through capacity-building programmes for enterprises and ILO's constituents - government, employers and workers - in four Asian countries including India.