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Education emerged as the most favoured area, followed by community-based development and environment sustainability for CSR spend by companies surveyed by global consultancy major, Mercer, which is part of Marsh & McLennan Companies in India consisting of Marsh, Mercer and Oliver Wyman.
Releasing the findings, the survey said 81 per cent of companies said their corporate social responsibility (CSR) spend was on activities concerning education, 64 per cent on community development and 61 per cent on environment sustainability.
With the new Companies Act in India mandating that 2 per cent of the average profit should be spent on CSR, 81 per cent of the surveyed companies said this had become and important part of their business strategy, Mercer said in a release.
Across industries and company sizes, budgets for CSR were varied, ranging from ₹ 900,000 to ₹ 25 crore a year.
According to the survey, conducted across 40 organisations in different Indian cities and across sectors, 73 per cent companies said they already had a CSR policy in place, 17 per cent said they were undertaking such activities without a policy or guidelines, while 10 per cent said their company did not undertake CSR activities.
“The importance of CSR/sustainability is seeping deep into Indian companies as three out of four companies in India already have or are planning to form a core team dedicated to CSR/sustainability within the next one to two years,” said Shanthi Naresh, Mercer India Business Leader, Information Solutions.
The survey, which has also been carried out globally, showed that nearly 44 per cent of Indian companies said they had a dedicated team responsible for CSR, compared with only around one-quarter of companies globally having a dedicated team.
However, “it is interesting to note that only about one-third of Indian organisations stated that they issue an integrated annual report on their CSR activities compared to the global results where almost half the participating companies worldwide stated that they provide an integrated annual report on CSR, presenting an area for improvement for companies in India,” said Mercer.
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