CSR-Professional India

  As a part of Youth Welfare Society-A leading group of  Corporate Social Responsibility professionals 

  Observations from CSR Rating of India's 500 largest companies:
  • Most companies are not doing any CSR
  • Many companies are only making token gestures towards CSR in tangential ways such as donations to charitable trusts or NGOs, sponsorship of events, etc
  • Most companies believe that charity and philanthropy equals to CSR; very few companies are using their core competence to benefit the community.
  • Most companies use CSR as a marketing tool to further spread the word about their business. For instance, donation of a token amount to some cause on purchase of a particular product. The fact that companies are hiring advertising agencies for their CSR further highlights this
  • Only Few Indian companies (from this study) publish a Corporate Sustainability Report to measure and assess the impact of their business on the environment .
  • Very few companies openly state the processes followed by them, the damage caused by these processes, and the steps taken to minimize this damage
  • Very few companies state how much they spend on CSR. There is no mention of the amount spent in any of their balance sheets or annual reports. Most companies just list and describe their CSR activities and seem to be spending minimal amounts on CSR
  • Very few companies are engaged in CSR activities in the local communities where they are based.
  • Very few companies have a clearly defined CSR philosophy. Most implement their CSR in an ad-hoc manner, unconnected with their business process.
  • Most companies spread their CSR funds thinly across many activities, thus somewhere losing the purpose of undertaking that activity
  • Most companies appear reluctant to themselves fulfill their CSR unless it is mandatory by law.
  • Generally speaking, most companies seem either unaware or don’t care about CSR. However, all companies can be considered to be an upward learning curve with respect to CSR and it is expected that the situation will improve.

Corporate Social Responsibility is thus just about two aspects:
  • This steps taken ba a company to nutrelize , minimize or off set the harmful effects of  caused by its process and product uses.
  • The further steps a company takes useing its resource ,core compitence, skills , location and funds for the benefit of people and the environment .