"ESG Compliance Isn’t Just Policy, It’s Daily Action And Risk Prevention"

Bojarajan Pasupathy spoke about how the company is helping manufacturers track and demonstrate compliance with the processes defined in their QHSE and ESG goals

"ESG Compliance Isn’t Just Policy, It’s Daily Action And Risk Prevention"

Bojarajan Pasupathy, Founder & CEO of Boombirds, brings over 16 years of experience in IT and product development, split evenly between startup environments and a multinational corporation. Having spent most of his professional journey in Singapore from 2000 to 2015, he returned to India with two clear goals-being closer to family and fulfilling a long-held dream of building his own startup.

That dream took shape as Softborne Technology Solutions, a product development company he founded after a brief but immersive stint running a vegan food manufacturing business with his wife, Ramya Bojarajan. Their venture, BeanWay Flavors Private Limited, produced tofu and soya milk in Chennai and supplied to over 250 supermarkets while operating four retail outlets in IT parks. Though it faced challenges to scale, this experience laid the groundwork for his deeper understanding of the eco-system and fuelled his entrepreneurial aspirations, eventually leading him to create Boombirds to help fellow business owners in the manufacturers eco-system to grow and scale their business.

In an interview with ResponsibleUs, Bojarajan spoke about how the company is helping manufacturers track and demonstrate compliance with the processes defined in their QHSE and ESG goals.

How is Boombirds helping with ESG operations?
When it comes to ESG operations, there are three key phases: consulting, operations, and reporting. Boombirds supports the consulting and operations phases by helping companies understand which regulations they need to follow and aligning those with the company's ESG goals by partnering with industry renowned ESG consultants. It also supports determining the kind of ESG reporting they want to do. Since ESG is a broad and open framework, they help guide companies through best practices and voluntary standards they might want to follow in the best interest of their clients.

What are the three phases of ESG support Boombirds offers?
There are three phases:
1.    Consulting - Understand what needs to be done and when. This is usually a one-time or annual activity.
2.    Operations - Regular, ongoing implementation of SOPs and ESG practices. This is where Boombirds play a significant role. 
3.    Reporting - Annual or contract-based reports shared with governments, clients, or internal stakeholders. Boombirds provides the proof and data points for ESG reporting. 

One important thing to note is ESG scope. Scope 3 means companies are also responsible for the environmental and safety practices of their outsourced partners, like third-party manufacturers (TPMs). Even if you outsource production, you still carry responsibility as a brand.

Outsourcing doesn't remove risk-it changes your role into one of governance. Typically, this governance happens through contracts and audits. But with Boombirds, manufacturers can go beyond that. Our platform gives them real-time visibility into whether their partners are following the required SOPs as agreed in their contracts.

This is especially important for large brands. They remain responsible for ensuring their suppliers meet QHSE standards-Quality, Health, Safety, and Environmental Compliance-which are key parts of ESG.

Boombirds helps operationalise and monitor these QHSE activities, making ESG more actionable. The goal is to prevent incidents, reduce environmental harm, and manage risks better. Manufacturing has a significant environmental impact, which is why ESG compliance is becoming mandatory worldwide.

Our platform helps companies demonstrate they're following through on their ESG goals-not just making policies, but practicing and auditing them regularly, improving them, and reducing their environmental footprint year after year. The most important aspect is many of these SOPs are closely tied with their day-to-day operations and enforce pro-active elimination of risks. 

How does Boombirds support ESG operations for manufacturers?
Each business creates its own practices based on the kind of raw materials they use, the safety measures they need to adhere during production, storage, transportation and the environmental risks their products might pose in real-world use. They typically start by engaging ESG consultants to understand what needs to be managed periodically. These become standard operating procedures (SOPs), and that's where Boombirds comes in.

For example, businesses might need daily safety checklists, work permits management, SUSA conversations, Gemba walks, audits for dangerous goods handling, audits for waste management, onboarding procedures for employees and vendors and many more-these are SOPs that emerge from consulting. These could be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or based on specific events like new hires/vendor onboarding covering daily operational self-assessments / cross-functional audits, periodic vendor audits, incident driven audits etc.

Boombirds helps digitalise all of these effortlessly with its no-code platform, suitable for business users to start simple and keep improving them as the process matures without involving IT teams for change management. SOPs are not one-size-fits-all-they are tailored to each company and region, considering local regulations, environmental conditions, and vendor types. Our no-code platform allows businesses to define, update, and schedule their SOPs and audits. It helps them to also execute, verify and demonstrate how they comply with their own internal ESG standards.

In essence, Boombirds enables manufacturers to track and prove compliance with the standard operating procedures they have defined. This is part of the operations phase, and it also naturally feeds into reporting for stakeholders, including the board and regulators.

How many manufacturers are working with Boombirds?
We implement Boombirds in two ways. We offer Boombirds in a cost-effective SaaS model to Small and Medium businesses (SMBs), while we provide Boombirds in a PaaS model for very large enterprises by hosting Boombirds in their own Cloud infrastructure in AWS/Azure. 

All the while our focus was to build a strong MVP and the product is now working well for our  initial PILOT customers. We are now starting to actively go to market (GTM).

The product is now at a stage where it's useful for manufacturers to manage their QHSE (Quality, Health, Safety &Environment) and ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) compliance operations. It also supports other compliance needs that manufacturers typically have like internal audits and adhering to their statutory / regulatory / HR compliances. 

The product is now used by companies in India, UAE, Qatar and South-East Asia.
 
What challenges do you face in convincing manufacturers to adopt Boombirds, especially since BRSR reporting is still voluntary and self-declared?
Our biggest challenge is awareness. Many businesses don't even know that a tool like Boombirds exists. Most still manage their ESG and Compliance operations manually-on paper, Excel sheets, and some may report the results in SharePoint sites. Even large companies follow this approach. There's no traceability, no way to check when audits were done or what conditions were like at the time of audits.

We have focused heavily on building a product that works in real operational contexts listening to our PILOT customer's feedback. That took time, especially since we're a bootstrapped company with limited resources. Now that we've reached a mature PMF stage, we are shifting gears to create awareness-and that's where Praveen is stepping in to lead our marketing and GTM efforts.

Our second challenge is urgency. Since BRSR isn't mandatory yet in India, some businesses don't feel the pressure to act. But we know the global trend. ESG reporting is already mandatory in the US and UK, and as India continues to grow as a manufacturing hub-especially for global companies-these standards will be enforced through contracts if not law. With the recent events in global trade policies, India is well positioned to be the largest manufacturing hub for global markets and the businesses should equip themselves with responsible practices to ensure that we create a sustainable growth. 

On one hand, this manufacturing boom is good for the economy and employment. On the other hand, it strains our natural resources and harms the environment. Sooner or later, the Indian government will have to make ESG compliance mandatory to protect our part of the planet.

We are preparing for that day. But more importantly, we want manufacturers to understand that even before it becomes law, adopting ESG best practices now will help them run sustainable businesses and protect the environment for future generations. Because no one wants to exploit and discard the Earth-we all need to take responsibility.

There's still a lot of confusion among business owners-especially around CSR reporting versus BRSR reporting. Many are unsure if they are the same. Do you offer both?
They are different. We don't focus on CSR reporting. Our work is centeredcentred on QHSE audits-Quality, Health, Safety, and Environment-which form the operational backbone of ESG. If a CSR activity overlaps with these areas, we might cover it, but our core focus remains strictly on QHSE and ESG operational audits and assessments.

The government has recently introduced new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies. How are you incorporating these regulations into your tools and audit processes?
To be honest, I'm not deeply familiar with the details of the new EPR policies yet. But I'd be happy to work with you or others to understand them better. However, in high level EPR is part of ESG Scope 3 responsibilities-especially relevant for waste and lifecycle impact. So yes, if a manufacturer is producing goods, they should be responsible for the product till its end of life, making sure it doesn't end up in a landfill. That's in line with the ESG philosophy, and our system is ready to incorporate those procedures easily and operationalize them.

When you are managing BRSR reporting and audits, how does the process work in practice? Are you using an app to handle it, or are you collecting real-time data separately and generating the reports afterward?
The idea is that audits and assessments are done continuously and recorded daily using Mobile Apps and Tablets. For example, take a Dangerous Goods Assessment-it's typically conducted by the department heads every day. They go through their areas and document whether the dangerous goods are being stored and managed correctly.

Another example is the Work Permits. Any changes happening within the factory needs to have clear and transparent processes to create, approve work permits and audit them upon completion for ensuring safety standards are appropriately followed.

Now, each department gives a self-score for their section. Then, on a weekly or fortnightly basis, cross-department audits are conducted. So, if a team gives themselves a 9 out of 10 every day, and then an external team comes in and gives them a 6, it's a clear sign that something isn't right. That's where our platform helps. Boombirds provides analytics and trends on how well policies are being followed-daily, weekly, or as per the cadence required and defined.

How does Boombirds support real-time compliance and create a transparent audit trail for ESG and safety reporting?
Think of Boombirds as the data backbone. When consultants or big firms come in for audits, they use our platform to access structured data that's already been collected over time. For example, one of our clients uses Boombirds for work permit management-ensuring compliance, safety checks, and more are happening in real time. That data then goes into the audit and ESG reports created by their ESG consultants.

Safety checks is not a one-time activity. Every work permit must follow specific safety procedures. It must go through an approval process, and any change in operations has to be supported by proper work permit requests, approvals, and internal audits.

This creates an audit trail. So, when an external auditor comes in, instead of handing over a stack of paper records, the team can simply open the system and give the auditor direct access. This real-time visibility not only builds transparency, but it also ensures compliance with agreed best practices daily.

Boombirds is a Business Process Compliance tool.

The purpose of Boombirds is to help companies digitally transform their Standard Operating Procedures to give a birds-eye view of their Compliance and Audit operations, strengthening their governance while reducing / even eliminating the risks significantly.

Boombirds gives peace of mind to the business owners and empowers governance team to continuously iterate and optimise SOPs for achieving operational excellence. 

We are proud to share that Boombirds, has been awarded the "Most Innovative Process Governance Tool for Compliance and Audit Team" at the 7th Edition of the Audit and Risk Summit & Awards 2025, held at ITC Maratha, Mumbai. 

[email protected]

What's Your Reaction?

like

dislike

love

funny

angry

sad

wow