CSR-steadily but contributing towards sustainable growth of India

CSR is the means through which Indian Inc. are embarking upon sustainable growth. This journey started a decade ago in 2007 from adoption of inclusive growth plan in 11^th Five Year plan and still making its way towards sustainable growth in India.

Although there are lots of misconceptions about CSR, many corporate citizens see this as philanthropy and have not understood its strategic imperatives in their businesses.   CSR has potential to contribute for every business process, if synced with core business ethos of company. It has ability to contribute to every risk or challenge comes on the way be it production, market penetration, stakeholder management, brand image communication, manpower efficiency, customer quality management or most important profitability. And all of it comes through creating value for societal and environmental challenges. In my opinion, looking at CSR as philanthropic tool is under estimating its value in business process. Thus, integration between CSR and business strategies make it sustainable and lucrative for both sides. Even, every stakeholder engrossed in the strategically designed and developed CSR projects get benefited from its shared growth.

CSR steadily, but significantly started contributing towards sustainable growth of India. The CSR data shared by many companies shows how it has made its presence through various activities and projects across all states and UTs.  Since its inception in 2014, a total of 48,606 CSR projects has been done till 2017. All these projects are spread in 29 thematic areas/sectors aligned with schedule VII of section 135 of Companies Act 2013. The major sectors in which Indian Inc. has spent its CSR fund are; education, skill development, preventive health, sanitation, environment sustainability, rural infra development, agriculture, sports, drinking water and rain water harvesting, Art  & culture etc. The diversification of CSR spent is ensuring the inclusiveness and growth across all the section of society and environment. If we look upon the CSR spent in last 4 years, it also shows the increasing CSR footprints in India. In last 4 years since its inception, Indian Inc has spent Rs 27724.3 Cr[i]. It is notable that CSR spends have increased approx 74% from 2014-15 to 2017-18.

The data reflects that CSR spent grew 27.4% in 2015-16, 15.3% in 2016-17 and 23% in 2017-18. Even, if we look upon CSR spent against prescribed budget, it has also grown from 78.8% in 2014-15 to 92.9% in 2017-18.

Through all these data presentation and elaboration I want to make point that CSR has not only started contributing towards sustainable growth but it would be revolutionary if corporate citizens integrate this with its business processes.

CSR must be looked as a tool to not only serve the society and environmental risk, but it will emphasizes to bring across all sections of society, companies, public and private institutions together to ensure sustained growth of India.

Let it not be a mere philanthropic tool.

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[i] Data source- KPMG CSR Survey 2017 and CSR Box

Primary education in India, How CSR can add value to it

India’s primary education delivery system has indeed transformed from its Gurukul to Macaulay’s education system in 20^th century and now Free and Compulsory education system. No one can deny that despite lots of challenges, India has achieved huge milestones in education sector because of its consistent efforts in last many decades by current and successive governments. There is significant access in schooling, increase in enrolments and development of infrastructure in education sector in different part of India.

In existing education service delivery system, there are 3 sources to provide primary education; Government established schools, Government aided schools (run by private institutions or societies) and Private schools. The primary responsibility to provide elementary education to children in country is lies with Government of India with support of their State counterparts. In current scenario Government schools are still largest source to access primary education while numbers of private schools are increasing too.

Some interesting trend emerges from the Annual Status Report 2016 (ASER). Enrolment of students has increased in comparison to its last year tally, the learning ability to students have increased too. The infrastructure has improved in Govt. schools, teacher pupils’ ratio has reached to the desired level, the ratio of gender parity has improved, most of schools are having sanitation facilities etc.

But still, it’s not enough to reach out to the goal for providing Free and Compulsory education to each and every child in the country. In spite of the massive expansion of educational facilities and efforts made for qualitative improvement of elementary education, the problems of access, participation and quality in respect of elementary education continued to persist. This, together with a variety of new challenges and social needs made it imperative to evolve a new design for education.

In my opinion, only few modifications in existing policy would not make any difference until there is paradigm shift in whole education approach. There is no any coherence between existing educational framework and potential employment sectors which is resulting into massive skill initiatives by Govt. After main stream education program, large chunk of youth are going for additional vocational skilling programs to acquire new skill sets to get employment. If, it would have been synced with their main stream education programs certainly they would have reduced time and effort to get employment and even Govt. might have reduced its exchequer on skill projects too.

Indian Inc may play a very crucial role by engaging with various stakeholders and may deliberate upon formulating a new education delivery mechanism. In new system, corporate may invest their earmarked CSR budget to strengthen, school infrastructure, supply teaching learning materials, capacity building of teachers, designing integrated curriculum and course content, use of technology in monitoring, assessment of schools and most important mobilization of students  to improve enrollment and attendance. To make govt. education system lucrative to its customer, corporate may add value by bringing lot of innovative practices from their business experiences.

So my take on this subject, there is need of developing synergy between education policies, course content, service delivery with taking India’s growth (next 25-30 years) in the consideration, especially being attentive to absorb its demographic dividends.  For any strong nation their foundation (children) to be strong as well and this could be achieved only by providing quality education to the children and linking education with nation growth plan. Indian Inc has to think beyond conventional education projects to transformative education projects in various streams.