CSR in India: A practical study and the path ahead

Abstract

India has become the first country to have mandatory corporate social responsibility imposed on companies with the enforcement of Companies act 2013. The country is sitting on huge potential money which will be contributed to CSR by the corporate. However, we still do not know what can be done with this money, where from the projects should be sourced, how to effectively implement the projects, how to monitor fund utilization and ultimately how to measure the impact of the project. There is a gap in the research in this context and unfortunately no study so far point towards the need of having a centralized mechanism through which everyone gets to know the actual potential and impact of CSR in the country. Therefore, this research work attempts to look into all the stakeholders involved in the process of executing CSR projects. As a result of our study, we have tried to provide a framework and a concept to Indian government, which will integrate all the stakeholders involved into the CSR projects. Our model is based on our extensive literature review, Which includes the review of the CSR in countries like US, UK, Australia, France & Germeny, review of evolution of idea of CSR in India and overall world and review of best practices followed in India by different companies and organizations. The literature review also consist of understanding of role of each of the stakeholders among government, NGOs, social enterprise and corporate. The model also has fundamentals attached to our estimation of state wise potential of CSR and primary interactions with various companies. Thus the proposed model is a crux of our entire secondary and primary research work.