Districts of Bihar that never received a single penny of CSR money

New Delhi, 11 February 2021: When it comes to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), few states of the country get step-motherly treatment by corporates in their effort of empowering communities. But, even within these states, there are districts which are further neglected in CSR based upliftment of society.

Take the example of Bihar. The state lagging in almost all development indicators comes under the last category where less than Rs 200 crores are spent under CSR every year, as per data compiled by Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA). In fact, overall annual CSR expenditure of companies in Bihar never touched even Rs 150 crores.

If CSR money going to Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh is compared, step-motherly treatment to states like Bihar becomes more evident. In 2018-19, Maharashtra received more than Rs 2,000 of CSR fund and Karnataka received more than Rs 1,200 crores.

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But interestingly, there are districts within Bihar which are further isolated and have not received even a single penny of CSR money since 2016. For example, districts like Katihar and Banka in Bihar have not received any CSR fund at all in the last five years. (See the graphs for detail).

Total CSR expenditure in districts of Bihar since 2016-17 (in Rs Cr)

Both of these districts fall in the category of Aspirational districts prepared by the Union Government to give extra push for development. Aspirational district refers to those 120 districts of the country where human development indicators are quite low as compared to other parts of the country.

These districts didn’t receive the attention of corporates despite the fact that the Union Government has requested them to focus on Aspirational districts in their CSR spending.

These details were given by Anurag Singh Thakur, the minister of state for finance and corporate affairs on February 8 in Lok Sabha when he was asked to furnish details of CSR money spent in Bihar. Janardan Singh Sigriwal, a ruling party parliamentarian from Maharajganj asked whether any amount has been spent under the CSR by the corporate companies in Bihar and requested district-wise data.

In MCA’s response, many other interesting facts surfaced. Like, there are few districts in Bihar which have received total funding of merely Rs 5 lakh, ever since the spending two per cent of three years of average income became mandatory.