Environmental accounting and reporting With special reference to India

In recent years, environmental pollution becomes so acute and the stakeholders’ awareness to the issue becomes so serious that environmental accounting has become a strong branch of accounting. Still, attention towards the style and recognition of environmental accounting is not a generalized one. Legal authorities, standard setting bodies and other regulators cannot come to a consensus regarding the conceptual framework of environmental accounting and its disclosure. Thus, such disclosure is not mandatory rather voluntary that has no specific style or format. With the passage of time, more guidelines are coming in customized format that may lead us to reach a common format for recognizing environment related data and disclosure thereof through financial statements. Still, such disclosure is guided by the social responsibility and commitment on the part of the entities that work as strong agents for polluting the environment. In this paper, the theoretical foundation of environmental accounting and reporting is discussed with special reference to India. More emphasis is given on environmental accounting and awareness for that as this is supposed to be the need of today.