regulatory and socio‐economic developments within the Indian corporate sector are likely to place various pressures on firms to conform and legitimise their environment and community activities. Agency theory generally concerns the principal–agent relationships between managers and capital providers (principals) who can be either shareholders or debt holders (Jensen and Meckling, 1976), and with the separation of ownership and management it is assumed that information asymmetry will exist between principals and agents. The principals may utilise bonding or monitoring mechanisms to reduce the information gap, although both entail costs. The use of boards and board committees and firm reports produced by management are different monitoring mechanisms which align the interests of principals and managers and reduce the cost of debt. Prior studies on voluntary disclosure have more specifically focussed on systematic variations between board characteristics such as board independence, CEO duality and board diversity in general and voluntary disclosures (Eng and Mak, 2003; Beltratti, 2005; Michelon and Parbonetti, 2012). However, these studies essentially focus on internal monitoring mechanisms and do not fully consider or integrate other societal and environmental factors that may drive CSR disclosure. For instance, Haniffa and Cooke (2005) identify ethnicity and cultural factors, and Othman et al. (2011) refer to regulatory efforts as externally oriented drivers of CSR disclosure.