Why CSR (India)

'Corporate social responsibility (CSR), also known as corporate responsibility, or sustainable responsible business (SRB), or corporate social performance, is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. Ideally, CSR policy would function as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby business would monitor and ensure its support to law, ethical standards, and international/ national norms, so that CSR-focused businesses would proactively promote the public interest by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public sphere, regardless of legality. Essentially, CSR is the deliberate inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making.

Though the practice of CSR is much debated and criticized, we from IRDS strongly believe that there is a strong business case for CSR because corporations are getting a lot of profits and benefits out of the society and hence it naturally becomes their duty to pay the society back in some due form. IN fact, we extend the idea of CSR a bit further by saying that since CSR helps the companies and firms as much as the society but due to their short-term visions many of the Corporate are not being able to appreciate these benefits and hence it becomes the societal responsibility as well to duly enforce these Corporate to fulfill their responsibility of appropriate and proper inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making to ensure long-term community growth and development in a holistic manner.

CSR in India has not come up in an encouraging manner. For various reasons, many Corporate are totally ignoring the concept of community growth and development. Thus as enlightened and socially concerned citizen of this Nation, it is our responsibility to make these Corporate aware of their responsibilities towards the society and to ensure that these Corporate actually perform their part of the service for the cause of public interest while fulfilling their prime motive of profitability.

IRDS makes this small beginning in the form of CSR India which would make all possible efforts to enforce the corporate world to follow the ISO 26000, the recognized international standard for CSR presently. They also need to follow the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). In practical terms, triple bottom line accounting means expanding the traditional reporting framework to take into account ecological and social performance in addition to financial performance. The concept of TBL demands that a company's responsibility lies with stakeholders rather than shareholders.. In this case, "stakeholders" refers to anyone who is influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the actions of the firm.

We all need to get ourselves acquainted with CSR in its broadest sense along with all the related concepts. There is also a need for all of us to contribute our little bits in ensuring that each Company and Firm finally adheres to these measures and takes CSR with complete sincerity in the widest possible way.

Amitabh Thakur
IPS,
IIM Lucknow
94155-34526