CSR Activities in Large Indian Firms—Descriptive Statistics

Abstract

Indian companies started disclosing their nonfinancial statements which includes information on CSR and related activities only very recently which makes it a difficult assignment to capture the actual CSR spending. In this chapter we investigate the information structure of CSR related activities and expenditure by drawing patterns across disclosure of initiatives and disclosure of expenditures. We go through all possible sources of information such as annual reports, websites, business responsibility reports etc. to gather understanding about each company’s activities that can be related to social responsibility in a broader sense. We observe that Indian companies disclose CSR expenditure under various heads and terms, and not necessarily as “CSR Expenditure” as one category. During the data collection exercise, we find that companies disclose CSR spending information under different heads like donations, charity, CSR Budget, Allocation, Reserves, Provisions, Social Welfare expenses in “other expenditure”.