New Delhi – Two years after the Central Consumer Protection Authority put its greenwashing rules into force, the compliance burden is landing where most companies did not expect it: not on the sustainability report, but on the packaging.
The Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Greenwashing or Misleading Environmental Claims were notified under Section 18 of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and took effect on 15 October 2024. They sit alongside the earlier rules on misleading advertisements, and they reach further than most corporate counsel initially read them to.
Every adjective now needs a document behind it
The core requirement is simple to state and expensive to meet. Words such as eco-friendly, green, sustainable and carbon-neutral cannot be used as atmosphere. Each must be backed either by certification from a statutory or credible authority, or by internal evidence a regulator could inspect.
Comparative claims carry a heavier test. Telling a consumer that a product is better for the environment than an alternative requires verifiable data, and that data has to be disclosed rather than merely held on file. The guidelines accept a QR code, a URL or a similar digital route, which in practice means the substantiation must exist in a form fit for public reading.
The liability net is wider than the brand
This is the provision that should concern boards. The guidelines apply to manufacturers, service providers, advertisers, advertising agencies and endorsers, and they do not distinguish between listed and unlisted entities. A creative agency that writes the line, and the public figure who reads it out, sit inside the same net as the company that sells the product.
Penalties run to ten lakh rupees, rising to fifty lakh for a subsequent contravention. Those are not figures that trouble a large balance sheet. The reputational exposure, and the prospect of a withdrawal order against a campaign already in market, is the real cost.
Where this collides with BRSR
For listed companies the awkwardness is structural. Marketing claims are drafted by brand teams. Environmental data is assembled by sustainability teams for the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report. In most organisations those two functions have never reconciled their numbers against each other.
Once BRSR Core figures are externally assured, that gap becomes visible. A company claiming carbon neutrality on a label while filing emissions data that does not support the claim has created a documented inconsistency in two disclosures it made itself.
What to do about it
- Inventory every environmental claim currently in market, including packaging, point of sale and influencer scripts.
- Map each claim to its evidence, and name the person who owns that evidence.
- Retire any claim whose substantiation would not survive being published at the end of a QR code.
- Put brand and sustainability teams in the same room before the next campaign, not after a notice arrives.
Source: Central Consumer Protection Authority guidelines notified under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs announcement of the same.
