Job Creation in Smaller Towns — BRSR Core KPI

What this attribute is

Job Creation in Smaller Towns is one of the nine BRSR Core KPIs that SEBI requires every Top-1,000 listed entity to subject to independent reasonable assurance. It is the only Core KPI under NGRBC Principle 8 — Inclusive Growth & Equitable Development, sitting alongside the four P6 environmental KPIs (GHG Intensity, Water Withdrawal Intensity, Energy Intensity, Waste Recycled), the three P3 employee-wellbeing KPIs (Wellbeing Spend, POSH Complaints, Female Wages), and the P9/P1 Openness KPI on related-party revenue.

The KPI measures the share of the entity’s total wage cost paid to persons employed in smaller towns. Importantly, the numerator is wages, not headcount — this distinguishes the KPI from a workforce-composition headcount metric and means a smaller-town workforce paid at lower wage levels will contribute proportionally less to the percentage than a metro workforce paid at higher levels. The cohort scope covers persons employed on a permanent or non-permanent / on-contract basis, including both employees and workers. Locations are classified using the RBI classification system (rural, semi-urban, urban, metropolitan), and the basis is the actual location of the job, not the residence of the person.

For Indian listed entities, this KPI is closely watched by ESG-rating agencies and lenders with explicit inclusive-growth covenants — particularly for entities in IT services, banking, and FMCG, where smaller-towns engagement is part of the recurring board narrative.

Formula and units

Job Creation in Smaller Towns (%) = (Wages paid to persons employed in smaller towns)
                                  ÷ (Total wage cost across all locations within India,
                                     for all persons employed) × 100

The numerator and denominator share the same persons-employed scope — covering employees and workers, on a permanent or non-permanent / on-contract basis — and the same wage-cost basis. The output is a percentage — unitless. PPP normalisation (which applies to physical-quantity intensities under P6) does not apply here.

The “smaller towns” set is defined relative to the RBI location classification (rural, semi-urban, urban, metropolitan). The exact reporting buckets and the prescribed treatment follow the BRSR Core taxonomy and the SEBI Industry Standards on Reporting of BRSR Core (December 2024 circular).

Location classification — RBI buckets

The KPI is built on the RBI’s location classification system, which categorises every Indian location into one of four buckets:

RBI bucket	Typical interpretation
Rural	Centres with population below the urban threshold per the RBI definition
Semi-urban	Centres in the lower urban-population band per the RBI definition
Urban	Centres in the upper urban-population band per the RBI definition
Metropolitan	The largest urban centres per the RBI definition

The exact population-threshold definitions for each bucket are set by the RBI’s Master Direction on banking-related location classification — the entity should refer to the current RBI definition for the operating jurisdictions, and follow the prescribed BRSR Core treatment of which buckets feed the “smaller towns” numerator. The disclosed BRSR figure should reference the RBI definition version applied.

The reporting structure typically requires wage cost broken out by bucket, with the percentage in smaller towns calculated as the share of the relevant non-metropolitan buckets in total wage cost.

The numerator: wages paid to persons employed in smaller towns

The numerator is the entity’s wage cost for persons employed at locations classified as “smaller towns” under the prescribed RBI-bucket convention. Three points to anchor:

• Wages, not headcount. The KPI measures wage cost share, not workforce composition share. A smaller-town location with 200 lower-paid roles contributes less to the numerator than a metro location with 100 higher-paid roles.
• Persons employed, broadly defined. Coverage includes both employees and workers; both permanent and non-permanent / on-contract; both directly-employed and contractor-engaged-but-paid-by-the-entity (per the entity’s documented cohort definitions).
• Actual job location. The location that counts is where the person performs the work — the entity’s facility, branch, office, or site of deployment in the HR / contract records — not the person’s residence.

The wages basis itself should follow the entity’s documented payroll-basis methodology applied consistently across the numerator and denominator (see the discussion on payroll basis in the Female Wages BRSR Core KPI page for the SEBI-aligned convention on what “wages” includes and excludes — that convention applies here too in spirit, anchored to the BRSR Core wording for this specific KPI).

The denominator: total wage cost across all locations within India

The denominator is the total wage cost across all locations within India, for the same persons-employed scope as the numerator (employees + workers, permanent + non-permanent / on-contract). Same payroll basis. Same period. Same cohort definitions.

The denominator should reconcile to the entity’s audited financial statements on the documented payroll basis. The numerator and denominator both work off the same underlying wage data, just sliced differently — by RBI-bucket location for the numerator’s smaller-towns slice, by the full set of locations for the denominator total.

International operations (if any) are typically excluded — the BRSR Core wording specifies “within India”. The entity should disclose the geographic scope alongside the figure.

Cohort scope — affirmatively broad

The BRSR Core wording on this KPI explicitly covers persons employed on a permanent or non-permanent / on-contract basis, including both employees and workers. The cohort scope is not an open interpretive question on this attribute — both cohorts and both employment bases are in scope by source.

What is the entity’s documented choice is the operational definition of each cohort and the boundary for contract-engaged persons (whether the entity treats a specific contractor’s workforce as in scope under its own coverage, or as the contractor’s separate population). Whatever boundary is documented in the Section A workforce composition table, it must be applied consistently here on both numerator and denominator.

Worked example

Illustrative only — not representative of a typical company. Job Creation in Smaller Towns varies materially by sector, geography of operations, and the entity’s wage levels across location classes. The numbers below are constructed to make the calculation structure clear; an actual filing must use the entity’s wage-cost data on the basis prescribed by the SEBI Industry Standards circular and the entity’s location classification per the prescribed RBI convention.

Same diversified mid-cap manufacturer used in the prior worked examples — declared operational-control boundary, standalone listed entity, FY 2024-25:

Step 1 — Numerator: wages by RBI location class

Total wage cost broken out by RBI bucket (covering employees + workers, permanent + non-permanent / on-contract, in India):

RBI bucket	Wage cost (₹ Cr)	Share of total
Rural	8	2.7%
Semi-urban	22	7.3%
Urban	28	9.3%
Metropolitan	242	80.7%
Total wage cost (India)	300	100%

For this illustrative entity, the prescribed convention treats Rural + Semi-urban + Urban as the “smaller towns” set (assumed for illustration — the actual prescribed treatment must be verified against the Dec 2024 circular).

Wages in smaller towns (Rural + Semi-urban + Urban) = 8 + 22 + 28 = ₹58 Cr

Step 2 — Denominator: total wage cost across all locations within India

Total wage cost (all RBI buckets) = ₹300 Cr

(Reconciles to the audited financial statements on the documented payroll basis, covering employees + workers, permanent + non-permanent / on-contract, India operations only.)

Step 3 — Job Creation in Smaller Towns %

Job Creation in Smaller Towns % = 58 ÷ 300 × 100 = 19.3%

Note that this percentage is wage-cost-weighted, not headcount-weighted. The same workforce composition expressed as a headcount share would likely give a higher percentage (because smaller-town workforce often skews to lower-paid roles than the metropolitan workforce). Reporting both in the BRSR narrative — wage-cost share (the assured Core KPI) plus headcount share (illustrative context) — is increasingly common.

The BRSR XBRL filing carries this percentage in the relevant taxonomy element (verify the current MCA-published BRSR taxonomy for the exact element name), with both current-year and previous-year values populated and the bucket-level wage breakdown filed alongside under the Principle 8 disclosures.

Source-document evidence

The full evidence-document inventory is on Document Evidence Requirements. For the Job Creation in Smaller Towns KPI specifically:

• Audited payroll register for the financial year — the wage-cost source for both numerator and denominator
• HR master records with location mapping — every employee and worker (direct + contract) tagged to the location of the job (the facility / branch / office / site of deployment)
• Facility / branch master — entity-level register of all operating locations within India with their RBI-bucket classification (rural / semi-urban / urban / metropolitan)
• Contract-staff records — for non-permanent / on-contract persons paid by the entity, the location-of-job and wage-cost data
• RBI classification reference — the published RBI Master Direction or notification used to determine each location’s bucket, retained as evidence of the classification
• Workforce reconciliation to Section A — the persons-employed scope on this KPI must reconcile to the Section A workforce composition table

The single highest-value pre-engagement task: reconciling the HR master (and contract-staff records) location tagging to the facility / branch master, and that master to the RBI bucket classification. Two reconciliation legs that must both be clean: workforce → location, and location → RBI bucket.

What this KPI captures — and what it doesn’t

Worth being explicit about scope:

• Captures: wage-cost share by location class, expressed as the smaller-towns slice of total wage cost. A wage-distribution-by-geography metric.
• Does not capture: headcount share by location, pay equity between metro and smaller-towns workforce, retention rates by location, career progression, or skill levels. A higher percentage means the entity is paying meaningfully into smaller-towns wages — but says nothing on its own about the quality of those roles or the workers’ relative pay.

These dimensions can be material for assessing the entity’s actual contribution to inclusive growth — but they are covered (where covered at all) by the broader P8 Leadership indicators, P3 wellbeing disclosures, and the entity’s qualitative BRSR narrative.

Common practice patterns in audit

Common practice patterns observed in BRSR engagements — not SEBI-recognised categories of finding:

1. RBI classification basis not disclosed. The percentage is reported without a reference to which RBI definition / notification version was applied to the entity’s locations. The basis should be disclosed alongside the figure.
2. Location-mapping gaps in HR / contract records. Employees, workers, or contract staff without an attached job-location create denominator-vs-numerator inconsistency. The reconciliation to the facility / branch master typically surfaces these gaps in the first audit pass.
3. Headcount vs wage-cost confusion. Some entities report headcount-share rather than wage-cost-share for this KPI — the BRSR Core wording is wage-cost. Internal management dashboards often track both, but the assured BRSR figure is the wage-cost percentage.
4. Persons-employed scope inconsistency. Numerator includes contract staff but denominator covers direct-employment only (or vice versa). The cohort scope must be the same on both sides — covering employees and workers, on a permanent or non-permanent / on-contract basis, per the BRSR Core wording.
5. Implementation matter — hybrid / remote workforce location. Persons with no fixed work-location (remote-first roles, multi-site coverage) need a documented basis for assignment to a single location for the KPI. Whichever basis the entity adopts (typically a notional home-base location), it should be disclosed and applied consistently.
6. Geographic boundary scope. International operations are typically excluded under the “within India” wording, but if the entity has operations partly in India and partly outside, the boundary applied should be disclosed and reconciled to the audited financials’ geographic segmentation.

XBRL filing

This KPI is filed in the BRSR XBRL instance document under the relevant element from the MCA-published BRSR taxonomy module. Element names and unit references should be verified against the current MCA taxonomy version before generating the instance document. The bucket-level wage breakdown by RBI classification is typically filed alongside the percentage. Both current-year and previous-year context references must be populated.

See XBRL Taxonomy for BRSR for the structural overview.

How this KPI rolls up into the BRSR Core engagement

This is the only BRSR Core KPI under Principle 8. The signed BRSR Core assurance report attests this percentage to reasonable assurance under SAE 3000 (Revised). Workpapers retained by the assurance partner cover the RBI classification basis applied per location, the HR master + contract-staff records reconciliation to the facility master, the wages-basis reconciliation to the audited financials, the persons-employed cohort-scope alignment between numerator and denominator, and the geographic boundary treatment.

For the engagement that produces the signed BRSR Core assurance opinion, see BRSR Core Assurance.

Related reading

• NGRBC Principle 8 — Inclusive Growth & Equitable Development — parent pillar
• Female Wages as % of Total Wages — sibling P3 Core KPI (also a wage-cost-share metric; payroll-basis convention transfers)
• GHG Emission Intensity per Revenue — sibling P6 Core KPI
• Water Withdrawal Intensity — sibling P6 Core KPI
• Spend on Wellbeing as % of Revenue — sibling P3 Core KPI
• POSH Complaints Disclosure — sibling P3 Core KPI
• Document Evidence Requirements — full evidence checklist
• XBRL Taxonomy for BRSR — XBRL filing structure
• BRSR Core Assurance — service