CHENNAI: India needs to create CSR strategies that would benefit the society at large and also help corporations contribute to the inclusive development and welfare of the country and its economy. This was the core theme of the two-day managament development programme on corporate responsibility and sustainability organised by Centre for Social Initiative and Management (CSIM) and Business & Community Foundation (BCF) on Tuesday.Inaugurating the programme, Anant Nadkarni, VP, Group Corporate Sustainability, Tata, spoke on how business can bank on their core competencies to reach out to the community. He said, “At Tata, we have 38,000 volunteers who spend 3 to 4 hours a week in the community. Through volunteering, we are able to bring in social consciousness among our employees at all levels. We look forward to working with the civil societies to take this journey of CSR forward.”PN Devarajan, founder of CSIM, said, “In India, CSR managers face a number of challenges. A lack of knowledge about the development sector and being unskilled in implementation are the main obstacles that hinder them from achieving sustainable development initiatives. This is where CSIM has been able to provide structured guidelines for corporations and individuals who wish to set up CSR initiative of their own.”Amita Joseph, Director of BCF, said, “Under the CSR guidelines for the private sector, it is mandated that they should spend 2 to 3 per cent of their profits on CSR, but looking at their spending on CSR is disappointing as it is mostly at 0.01 to 0.03 per cent. But corporates are also lobbying to make CSR voluntary or reduce it to one per cent of their profits.”Amita quoted P Sainath’s critique speech on Government of India writing off taxes to corporates saying the companies should be made responsible towards the community. “The government had written off `80,000 crore in direct Income Tax, approximately `1,70,000 crore in Excise Duty and `2,50,000 crore in Customs Duty to the corporates in the 2010 Budget. These are only write offs not subsides, which are much larger than these figures. When these private sector corporates get so much of freebies, why can’t the government ensure that they at least adhere to the mandated spending of two per cent of their profits toward the CSR?”The two-day conference will deliberate upon a range of topics, including SEZs, resettlement and rehabilitation, what not to do in CSR, corporate governance, sustainability reporting, business and human rights, CSR guidelines and CSR policy framework.
Comments
0 comment