Bharti Airtel

Bharti Airtel demonstrates support for affordable and inclusive access to digital technologies through short-term initiatives. It has extended the talk time allowance for low-income customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also distributed laptops to girls from rural communities as part of its corporate citizenship programme. Bharti Airtel discloses the number of employees with disabilities and how its economic value is distributed among its stakeholders.

No evidence could be found of leading practices in this area.

Bharti Airtel demonstrates high-level responsibility for cybersecurity. In its human rights policy, Bharti Airtel also commits to protect minors from information distributed by the company.

Bharti Airtel supports technology innovation ecosystems through its Startup Accelerator Programme that focuses on start-ups in areas such as artificial intelligence, cloud and digital learning. The company is also committed to reduce its environmental impact as evidenced by its efforts to power its data centres with renewable energy.

There is some evidence that Bharti Airtel enables affordable and inclusive access to digital technologies for vulnerable groups. However, the company could adopt a more strategic approach in supporting universal access to digital technologies for underserved populations and digital opportunities for women and girls.

Although many of the Bharti Airtel’s corporate social responsibility programmes are related to education, none of them are focused on digital skills development.

Although Bharti Airtel includes a commitment to protect minors online in its human rights policy, it could demonstrate more clearly how it does this. Similarly, the company could elaborate more on its activities relating to cybersecurity management, including an explanation of how it monitors and responds to information security incidents. Operating across 16 countries in South Asia and Africa, Bharti Airtel should also adopt a global privacy policy that applies identically to all its customers.

Even though Bharti Airtel is a member of many standards organisations, it should further demonstrate how it supports open innovation. Despite disclosing about its initiatives that support technology innovation ecosystems and reduce company’s environmental footprint, Bharti Airtel should report in more detail about how it ensures that it innovates inclusively, ethically and sustainably.

Bharti Airtel commits to respect human rights and expects its business relationships to commit to respecting the ILO core labour rights. However it does not disclose, in a public policy statement, a commitment to respect the rights of employees to bargain collectively, nor does it require this from its business relationships. The company identifies salient human rights risks in its operations and business relationships, but it does not disclose a process to assess and take action on these human rights risks. Bharti Airtel has a grievance mechanism that is accessible to workers and external stakeholders to raise human rights concerns and complaints.

Bharti Airtel publicly commits to respecting the health and safety of its own workers and places health and safety expectations on its business relationships and monitors their performance. However, the company provides no relevant evidence on the topic of living wages. Furthermore, while it provides a breakdown of employees in different employee categories by gender, and has at least 30% women on the board, it does not report against any other indicators of diversity per employee category.

Bharti Airtel has a policy prohibiting bribery and corruption and incudes anti-bribery and anti-corruption clauses in contracts with its business relationships. Furthermore, the company has a grievance mechanism for stakeholders to raise concerns and complaints on the topic. The company also discloses a global tax strategy and a breakdown of income tax payments for all of the company’s tax jurisdictions. However, Bharti Airtel does not disclose its approach to lobbying and political engagement. Specifically, the company has no public statement indicating that it does not make political contributions, and it does not disclose its lobbying expenditures.

The below datasheet disaggregates scores within the three core social measurement areas and by specific indicators.