1. Purpose
The India Portfolio ESG Benchmark (the "Benchmark") exists to establish a common, practitioner-owned set of ESG metrics for privately held companies in India, and to publish an annual, anonymised benchmark showing how portfolios perform against that set.
Indian capital allocators today assess portfolio ESG performance against inconsistent, self-defined metric sets. There is no comparable peer reference. ESG data is collected repeatedly, interpreted differently by each fund, and cannot be used for the decisions it is gathered to support — pricing, value creation, exit readiness and LP reporting.
2. Scope
Within scope:
- Ratification of the Benchmark Metric Set and its subsequent versions
- Review and approval of methodology, including scoring, weighting, normalisation and cohort definitions
- Review of draft findings prior to publication
- Guidance on sector, stage and asset-class segmentation
- Expressly outside scope: policy advocacy or regulatory representation of any kind; endorsement or procurement of any commercial product; anything touching the commercial or investment decisions of member firms
3. Membership
Contributing Members are capital allocators — VC and PE funds, NBFCs, family offices, corporate venture arms, incubators and accelerators — that contribute portfolio data. They hold voting rights, and the founding cohort is capped at twelve.
Observers — limited partners, development finance institutions and public financial institutions — attend meetings and receive all materials, but do not contribute data and do not vote. Each member nominates one primary representative and one alternate, expected to be practitioners rather than nominal senior appointees. There is no membership fee.
4. Governance
A Chair is elected annually from among the Contributing Members for a one-year term, renewable once. Fandoro Technologies Private Limited serves as Secretariat: it convenes meetings, aggregates and analyses data, drafts the Metric Set, and produces the annual publication. The Secretariat does not hold a vote.
Metric Set versions and methodology changes are adopted by simple majority of Contributing Members present. Quorum is one half. Written positions submitted in advance count toward quorum and vote. The Panel meets twice each year for ninety minutes.
5. Data contribution and confidentiality
Members supply portfolio-company ESG data during a defined annual window.
- All data is aggregated and anonymised before use; no portfolio company and no member firm is identifiable in any published output
- No cut is published where the sample is fewer than five portfolio companies drawn from at least three distinct members
- Member data is never disclosed to other members in identifiable form, at any time, for any purpose
- Data is used solely for Benchmark production and methodology development
- A member may withdraw its data at any time on written notice; it is excluded from all subsequent editions
- The Secretariat maintains an information security management system certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022
6. Intellectual property and publication
The Metric Set is published openly with attribution to the Panel and may be used freely by anyone, including non-members. It is a public good and is not proprietary to the Secretariat.
Contributing Members receive their own portfolio's position confidentially ahead of publication, and the draft report under embargo not less than three weeks before publication.
7. Use of name
Members may state their membership in their own communications, LP reporting and marketing. Neither the Panel's name nor any member's name may be used to imply endorsement of a commercial product or service.
8. Term, withdrawal and amendment
This Charter takes effect on confirmation by the founding cohort and continues until amended or dissolved. Members may withdraw at any time on written notice, with the data provisions of Section 5 continuing to apply. Amendments require a simple majority of Contributing Members.