Developing a framework for corporate social responsibility as a business case power and oil and gas sector in India

Abstract

With the enactment of new Companies Act 2013 read with rules thereto, the present research was motivated by the increased focus of Corporates and Government towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The pre-conceived thoughts of Corporates about CSR are that it should be the responsibility of Government and not the Corporates. With the regulations putting responsibility of CSR on Corporates, in general parlance, CSR can easily be considered as a tax or an additional cess imposed on Corporates for the benefit of the society at large. Thus, it was felt that there is huge opportunity for Corporates to understand that Strategic CSR is the need of the hour and it is high time to give away the traditional concept of philanthropic CSR and move to Strategic CSR. This study is based on primary research with a perception-based questionnaire collected from senior officials of the target population companies focusing on developing framework for Corporates where a strategic CSR can act as a business case contributing back to the business. The study is based on Power and Oil and Gas sector indices of BSE (Bombay Stock Exchange) which acts as a representative of the Power and Oil and Gas industry in India. It has been found that various constructs of CSR i.e. (i) Community Development, (ii) Human Resources, (iii) Service and Product Contribution, and (iv) Physical Resources and Environment Contribution together helps contributing to business benefits such as (i) Retention of employees, (ii) Loyal Customer base, (iii) Easy access of Funds which in turn helps the Corporate to gain Reputation Social and Business. Also, as a part of the study, a secondary research was also carried out where a detailed content analysis of the annual reports of target population countries is done to ... newline