No unit, wrong scale: the BRSR fields that trip up analysis
About a quarter of Scope 1 values in filed BRSR XBRL carry no unit, and some report physically impossible emissions. What to check before you file.
- Key finding
- About 26% of Scope 1 rows in filed BRSR XBRL are tagged with no unit at all.
- Data
- BRSR filings on NSE and BSE, FY2021-22 to FY2025-26
- Scope
- Aggregate figures only; no company is named
- From
- Sustainize, Dscvry's sustainability reporting product: it collects ESG data, checks it, and produces GRI, BRSR, ESRS and ISSB disclosures with every number traced to its source.
Two things make a reported number useful: the figure and its unit. In BRSR XBRL, the second is missing surprisingly often, and when the scale slips the result can be off by a factor of ten million.
Values with no unit
About 26% of Scope 1 rows in filed BRSR XBRL are tagged as unit-less. In the FY2021-22 and FY2022-23 taxonomies, Scope 1 and Scope 2 were routinely filed this way. Without a unit, a reader cannot tell whether a figure is in tonnes or grams; we have seen gram values sitting in fields that everyone reads as tonnes.
Energy is worse in the early years: unit-less energy figures in FY2021-22 and FY2022-23 filings are ambiguous between joules, megajoules and gigajoules, so we leave them empty rather than guess.
Values at an impossible scale
At least a dozen company-years in the filings, about 0.3%, report Scope 1 or Scope 2 emissions of a billion tonnes or more, which no single company emits. That is a lower bound for scale errors. A recurring cause is a currency multiplier, typically a crore (ten million), applied to a physical quantity: tonnes entered as if they were rupees.
A label that looks wrong but isn't
The taxonomy label MtCO2e means metric tonnes of CO2-equivalent, not megatonnes. Values tagged MtCO2e and tCO2e sit on the same scale. Reading it as megatonnes inflates a company's emissions a million times.
Energy comes in five units
Energy is filed in J, kJ, MJ, GJ and TJ. All are legitimate, but comparing companies, or one company across years, means converting each value to one unit first.
A checklist before you file
- Every value carries a unit.
- No currency multiplier (lakh, crore) is applied to a quantity.
- Percentages stay between 0 and 100.
- Figures reported twice, for example in BRSR Core and in GRI, agree after unit conversion.
- No period is left blank without an explanation.
Sustainize runs these checks on your data before filing, explains why each one matters, and fixes a scale error in one click. Try the BRSR filing check in the live demo.
Method and caveats
- Unit counts are over current-year Scope 1 rows in the XBRL, including both exchange copies.
- The billion-tonne count is a floor: values flagged as impossible are excluded from our clean dataset, so smaller scale errors are not counted here.
- Figures are aggregate and no company is named.
- Source: Dscvry analysis of BRSR XBRL filings on NSE and BSE, FY2021-22 to FY2025-26.