New Delhi : In a disappointing start to the much-touted CSR regime, a vast majority of the country’s top blue-chip companies have failed to spend the minimum 2% of profits on social responsibility activities in the first year by missing the target by one-third on an average.
Collectively, the 30 Sensex companies are estimated to have spent about Rs 3,500 crore on CSR initiatives during the 2014-15 fiscal, when they were required to spend nearly Rs 5,000 crore under the new Companies Act. Together, they are estimated to have clocked a three-year-average net profit of Rs 2.5 lakh crore, of which they were required to spend 2 per cent on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Making the scorecard even worse, just seven of them could meet this two per cent threshold in time. These firms include Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries, ITC, Mahindra and Mahindra, Wipro, Hindustan Unilever, Tata Steel and Coal India, while Infosys also managed to meet the target although after a delay by a few days for a small amount of Rs 3 crore. Interestingly, quite a few companies have also tried to defend their failure to meet the threshold with reasons like ‘money already having been earmarked’ and ‘delays in getting requisite approvals for spending the prescribed amounts’. Quite a few public sector companies have also failed to meet the target. The companies whose actual CSR spending was less than 2% during the year included HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, SBI, Dr Reddy’s, HDFC, Bajaj Auto, Bharti Airtel, Hero Motocorp, Hindalco, Larsen and Toubro, TCS, Lupin, Cipla, Maruti Suzuki, GAIL, NTPC, BHEL and ONGC. All of them have expressed commitment to the CSR work.
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