In India, Government has the key responsibility for society’s development by implementing different plans and policies. But only Government’s participation in social development is not enough, so more stakeholders need to involve and here the corporate entities have an important role to use their resources for the social development.
This study has been carried out with the following two specific objectives:-
• To study the initiatives taken by the selected Indian companies in the ground of CSR.
• To analyze whether the selected companies are compliance with the Companies Act. 2013 regarding the amount spends for CSR purpose.
Carroll (1979) defined that there are four types of responsibilities which a company has to fulfill, namely- “economic, legal, ethical and discretionary responsibilities”. In Economic responsibility, a firm has to earn profit for its shareholders. In legal responsibility, the firm should follow the rules, regulations imposed by government while doing business. Ethical responsibility refers to the activities of the management without partiality, and finally discretionary responsibility is the moral duty of the companies to contribute for the social development. S. Pradhan and A. Ranjan (2010) examined the CSR initiatives of Indian companies in rural development and came to the conclusion that companies have realized social and economic growth of the local communities is a big issue for doing business in an efficient way and they are engaged with different kinds of social activities in rural areas for better social and economic growth. A.K. Srivastava, G. Negi, V. Mishra and S. Pandey (2012) examined the CSR performance of TATA group and concluded that TATA group is performing its duty and responsibility towards the nation in an efficient way. N. Singh, R. Srivastava and R. Rastogi (2013) analyzed the CSR practices of selected banks and they concluded that the banks are performing their CSR activities in an efficient manner. V.L. Govindarajan, N.V. Kumar and N. Purusothaman (2013) attempted to see whether there is any linkage between the CSR initiatives and financial and stock market performances of the companies and they concluded that there is a positive relation between CSR score and stock market performances of selected companies. T.S. Mundhe (2013) conducted the research on impact of Indian ethos and CSR of selected Indian companies, where the result shows that Indian ethos help to the Indian companies to realize their social performance and the CSR activities of the selected companies have a great role in development. P.D. Sawant (2014) analyzed CSR practices, initiatives and expenditures of selected pharmaceutical companies in India. The result shows that the companies have taken different initiatives to discharge their social duties. Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd. was the only entity to spend near 2% of its average net profits of the preceding three years (i.e. 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12), while no other entity was close to this percentage. J.A. Bhat and Dr. N.Z. Qureshi (2014) investigated the CSR initiatives of selected life insurance companies in India and they came to the conclusion that life insurance sector is contributing in social development by implementing various projects. H.A. Khan, A. Zahoor and S. Irum (2014) attempted to find out the impacts of CSR on employees’ behavior in telecom sector of Pakistan, where they concluded that CSR activities has the great role on employees’ performance level. CSR initiatives help the employees’ to feel proud and make them more committed towards the organization. N. Guruvaiah and M.B. Rao analyzed the role of corporate organizations in social development, where they observed that 62% of manufacturing companies focused on CSR activities in terms of environmental concern, as manufacturing units damage the environment by different ways and 72% of service organizations paid attention on different social issues, besides, it had been seen that there is a positive relation between the amount of CSR spend and the performance of the companies.
This study is purely based on secondary data. Secondary data has been collected from the published annual reports of the selected Indian companies for the period of four years (i.e. from 2011-2012 to 2014-2015). Six Indian companies, namely- Asian Paints Ltd., Axis Bank Ltd., Dabur India Ltd., Exide Industries Ltd., Emami Ltd. and Tata Chemicals Ltd. have been selected by random sampling technique.
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