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Article

20 Mar 2017

Author:
Aruna Chandrasekhar, Wire

Norway’s Wealth Fund Blacklists Vedanta, Other Indian Firms Over Rights Violations, Climate Impact

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) – the world’s largest sovereign wealth or state-owned investment fund – continued to put a series of companies with Indian operations on its exclusion lists, citing human rights, environmental and climate change impacts. These include companies with substantial investments in metals, coal and thermal power. Following the Norwegian parliament’s call for a withdrawal of the GPFG’s investment in coal stocks and bonds in 2015, the Norges Bank adopted a coal criterion in February 2016, excluding companies who earned 30% of their revenue or had 30% of their activities dependent on thermal coal. In April 2016, it divested from 13 Indian coal companies, including Coal India Ltd., NTPC, Reliance Power, Reliance Infrastructure Ltd., Tata Power, Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation and CESC, besides others. So far, 69 companies have been put on the exclusion list, and two on observation...In the first ever public-ranking of human rights performance Corporate Human Rights Benchmark, Coal India ranked at the bottom of the pool of 98 publicly-traded companies evaluated for performance, human rights due diligence, remedy and responding to serious allegations.