‘India Inc, Govt should work together for national development’

Corporate India can partner government in the national development agenda, P P Chaudhary, Minister of State (MoS) for Corporate Affairs, suggested.

This is a golden opportunity for companies not only to meet the CSR mandate, but also to be a part of large scale nation building initiatives and help improve delivery of government programmes, Chaudhary said at CII National CSR Summit here.

Chaudhary also said that the framework of CSR under the Companies Act 2013 has the potential to unlock a substantial amount ranging between ₹ 15,000 crore to ₹ 20,000 crore in next 2-3 years.

Word of caution

While lauding the efforts of Corporate India for largely complying with the CSR provisions, Chaudhary at the same time said that some violations of the provisions have been reported.

To discourage such violations, government has sanctioned prosecution proceedings against 284 companies. Also, based on scrutiny, preliminary notices have been issued to 5,382 companies for violations reported during the financial year 2015-16.

Also read:Firms sitting on unspent CSR funds may face heat

“However, these are very small numbers when we compare them with the contributions that are being made by the corporate sector in the development of the country. This is what we need to celebrate and emphasise,” Chaudhary said.

Impactful

Chaudhary said that there are a number of ways through which CSR can be made more impactful and companies need to innovate ways and means of doing so. “Companies have all the subject expertise and resources to conceptualise and implement an innovative project rather than follow tried and tested projects. I feel there are many avenues through which companies can use their core competencies”, he said.

For example, a technology company can develop technology that aids the cause of education or healthcare for the poor; a consulting firm can provide free consulting services for social causes; a research entity can do advocacy on relevant issues; and a media house can contribute to awareness generation.

At the CII’s CSR Summit titled “Re-Imagining CSR: Innovate, Integrate and Impact”, Chaudhary reeled out statistics on the corporates’ CSR spend for 2015-16. Companies spent about ₹ 4,330 crore on healthcare, eradicating poverty, hunger and malnutrition. Around ₹ 4,690 crore were spent in the area of education and livelihood and ₹ 1,327 crore was spent on rural development.

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