FICCI Study: wp Can Offer Connectivity, Subsidy Aid to 50,000 Villages

INDIAN corporates can provide mobile connectivity to 50,000 villages, and help government in reducing budgeted fertilizer subsidy burden by 80 percent, from the Corporate Social Responsibility (wp) budgets in the current financial year, says a report by FICCI & Accenture.

The report ‘Organizing for Success on Corporate Responsibility: The Path to High Performance’ points out that the new law presents several opportunities for Indian companies to not only strengthen their wp efforts, but also shape India’s economic future and their own global competitiveness. In the report, Shaifalika Panda, Co-chairperson, FICCI Young leaders, and CEO, Bansidhar and Ila Panda Foundation, suggests that this is an opportunity for companies to move away from a narrow vision of wp to a broader vision of wp comprising actions that will help create a people and planet-friendly business environment, enabling a generation of socially-responsible profits. She suggested that board and senior management must take up the corporate social responsibility agenda and align it to business strategy.

Sanjay Dawar, Managing Director and Lead, Accenture Strategy, said, “In the short term, a large section of businesses in India will continue to focus on building their wp muscle. At the same time, we strongly believe that they will embrace the CR paradigm, as they bridge capability gaps and gain experience on the way.”

The report also features several case studies of CR high performers. For this report, CR-high performers are companies who are consistently allocating a sizeable portion of resources to wp initiatives during the last three years, have undertaken a range of social environmental and people-centric initiatives toward creating holistic and harmonious change benefiting communities as well as the business at large; and have developed a well-defined plan for their future CR actions.

With the passage of Companies Act 2013, Indian businesses must now add wp to their performance dashboards and it is estimated about Rs 20,000 crore could be unlocked from a pool of around 16,000 companies toward wp spending in 2014-15.