Introduction
Influence of sustainability practices in driving business excellence in case of big corporate houses and multinational companies is evident. These companies have their sustainable practices regularly audited and in most cases the results form a part of their annual report. However in case of small and medium enterprises sustainability practices especially those related to social and environmental aspects of their operations are grossly neglected. This is specifically true for SMEs of emerging markets. Earlier studies have identified current level of social and environmental initiatives being practiced by SMEs predominantly in the context of developed nations (Evans and Sawyer, 2010), but their contribution in improving the business performance of the SMEs or in enhancing their competitive advantage is not very evident. Earlier researchers have shown that, apart from government intervention some of the important factors that help sustainable growth of SMEs are development of entrepreneurial skill (Petkovic et al, 2016) , partnership and collaboration, internationalization and opportunity for innovation (Lamberty & Noci, 2012) .
We restricted our study in SMEs only. This is firstly because considerable research gap exists in this area. Most of the research in the field of sustainability performance and firm performance association, analyzed this relationship for big companies in developed countries (Goyal, Rahman & Kazmi, 2015). Secondly, in spite of their immense contribution to the economy of a country a large percentage of SMEs in most of the countries encounter bankruptcy within few years of incorporation or remain stagnant within a small scale of operation (Reeg, 2013). SMEs together account for close to 90% of global businesses and create 50-60% of the total employment worldwide. Thus it is important to study the sustainability factors of this huge sector with potential growth possibilities.
The objective of this paper is to develop a model and find out how factors like collaborative approach of operation at industry level and government intervention at policy level impact the sustainability performance of SMEs in India and how in turn the improved sustainability performance help to drive their business growth. Sustainability literature has focused on main three dimensions of business sustainability namely economic sustainability, environmental sustainability and social sustainability. For obvious reason economic viability has remained the main objective of business development. In our current study we have considered other two so far neglected but equally important dimensions of sustainability that is environmental and social responsibilities of business operations.