'CSR: Education, healthcare, rural development top priority for corporate in India'

By Somesh Menon

New Delhi, 31 August 2020: When it comes to CSR spending in India, Education, skill development, healthcare, sanitation and rural development are the major focus areas for corporate, as per an analysis published by CRISIL Foundation.

The paper named ‘Doing Good in Bad Times- CRISIL CSR year book 2020’ says "Education and skill development, healthcare and sanitation, and rural development accounted for 75% of the total spend on CSR, up a good 500 basis points on-year." The prescribed CSR budget for a company is calculated as 2 % of the ‘average net profit’ of the company over last three years. Thus, the companies can exactly calculate how much they need to spend on CSR activities in a particular financial year.

The report further states that among these areas, education and skill development saw the highest CSR spending in the financial year 2019-20, in terms of both, number of companies spending (1,030) and proportion of total spend which went up to 36.16% from 35.03% of the previous year).

Healthcare and sanitation remained the second-highest, with its share of spend increasing to a notable 27.60% from 23.55% a year ago. The number of companies spending on this sector also increased to 881 from 813 the previous year, it added.

Rural development remained on the third position in terms of getting the CSR attention, with 310 companies spending on it compared to 281 previous year, and average spend highest among all categories. However, its share of the pie declined from 11.64% to 10.78%, the report underlines.

Among other areas, relief funds and benefits for armed forces also logged an increase in CSR spend on-year.

At the other end, spending on environment fell to 7.60% from 10.08%. Spending on national heritage protection also fell to 1.08% from 3.42% the previous fiscal, after almost tripling in the four fiscals through 2018. Spending on promotion of sports, which almost doubled over the four fiscals, also saw its share shrink.

CRISIL drew up a list of top 100 companies by revenue and CSR spend each in fiscal 2019, and checked whether they were alive to the need to alleviate the widespread distress caused by the pandemic.

Of the 200, a total of 70 appeared in both lists, while 60 figured in only one. Of this total 130, 113 companies spent on pandemic-related mitigation, according to data available in the public domain up to May 15, 2020.

Of this, about 84 companies (including support through the corporate group) contributed Rs 7,537 crore during March-May 2020, which can be classified as CSR spend. The remaining 29 either contributed to other funds (Rs 373 crore), and/or facilitated voluntary employee donations (Rs 84 crore) that cannot be classified as CSR spend, or donated solely in kind (food and masks), for which assigning a monetary value was difficult.