Integrating National Social Missions and Infrastructure Development in the Indian Context: A New Direction for CSR Expenditure

Shift in the philosophy of corporate responsibility being voluntary to mandatory has enforced the business organizations to spend 2% of their average net profit on various community development activities. Across the sectors it can be observed that there has been more emphasis on some select areas such as education and environment. The not so focused and scattered initiatives have resulted in the underutilization of the budgeted CSR across businesses belonging to various sectors. The concept of CSR being seen as a mandate has resulted in the money being spent but not resulting in the outcome which can be seen as sustained activity. Authors in this paper investigated 120 top market cap companies for their CSR expenditure between FY 2014-2015 to FY 2017-2018. CSR funds utilization of these companies was analyzed with respect to 8 designated areas such as education, health and sanitation, environment, women empowerment etc. as per the CSR Act 2013. Data collection for the study is based on the authentic sources such as publicly available annual reports of the companies and Bloomberg. The study discusses the role of these companies with regard to nontargeted CSR budget spending and it’s relationship with national Missions/ Policies/ Agenda. With a focused approach and strategy which involves all the stakeholder’s involvement, the study proposes a theoretical model for utilization of the CSR funds such as infrastructure building for national missions such as SWACH Bharat, Ayushman Bharat , Smart City Initiatives etc.