The Real Concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in India

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility in India is meant to take a move to develop the society which is underdeveloped or undeveloped. As the term includes the word ‘corporate’, this move needs to be taken by the corporates respective to their profits and in India, underdeveloped society is synonymous to rural society. Therefore, there is a need to assess the role of corporates in rural development by their CSR initiatives so as to reach over the real concept of CSR in India. The present paper attempts to highlight the real concept of CSR after inclusion of the current legal framework of CSR in India, i.e. Clause 135 of the Companies Act, 2013. The study is of conceptual nature and purely based on secondary data retrieved from the annual reports of the select companies. For the same, a sample of 20 companies listed under S & P BSE Index has been chosen using systematic sampling method (every 5th company has been taken from the mentioned index). The CSR initiatives taken by them during 2014-15 have been intensively studied and distribution of such initiatives has been shown through a bar diagram. The findings of study show that CSR in India is mainly for the rural development of India. As the pace of rural development has been going up, which is somewhere due to the combined efforts of the government and the Indian companies in which government had been bearing more responsibility since beginning, the present legal provision of CSR puts the major chunk of this responsibility over the shoulders of the business groups and they are playing a marvelous role as well. The results of present study also support to infer that the real concept of CSR in India currently is the rural development.