CSR Practices – Trends and Compliance a Comparative Study Between Select Public and Private Sector Companies in India

Abstract

A business is a social entity. Over its entire lifetime it uses various social resources and thus, in turn, has a responsibility towards maintaining the societal wellbeing. Since in every country large corporate organizations are the highest consumers of societal resources, they are expected to discharge their social responsibility as a pre-condition for long term sustainability and growth. Keeping this in mind, regulators in different countries initiate well defined regulatory mechanism to guide and monitor the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities undertaken by corporate firms. Unfortunately, Indian regulators had largely overlooked such a requirement, though, in a developing country like India, this could have been the most important. However, with the introduction of the new Companies Act 2013, which has introduced a well defined framework in this respect, the situation seems changing significantly and in a positive direction. In this backdrop, our study attempts a comparative investigation into the trends in CSR activities undertaken by selected leading private and public sector companies of India and the degree of compliance achieved by them.