NITIE plays host to another Samiksha:
Corporate Social Responsibility
- A Reality or an Illusion
 

Corporate Social Responsibility is rarely a topic of discussion in any B-School; unless you are in National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai. Keeping their tradition of taking up unusual but highly relevant topics, the students of Industrial Safety and Environmental Management (ISEM) at NITIE organized a panel discussion on CSR.

The discussion titled "Corporate Social Responsibility: A reality or an Illusion" had a panel graced by eminent speakers like Mr. Debi Goenka (Bombay Environment Action Group), Mr. Krishna Das (VP-HR, Mahindra & Mahindra), Mr. Subhash Baxi (Corporate Manager-SHE-Greater Asia Region, Kodak), Mrs. Seema Unnikrishan (Professor Environment Management, NITIE. The event was divided into two parts, a session of talks by the panel members and a discussion among the panelists. Prof. H.V. Bhasin, Dean (Programs and Consultancy) at NITIE, moderated the panel discussion in a very efficient manner, especially with the audience participating enthusiastically in it.

Professor Unnikrishnan began the event by giving an academician's perspective about CSR as a whole & how things fit into the scheme of sustainable business model. She introduced many current CSR initiatives in India detailing how the community is benefiting from such activities.

Now that the groundwork had been laid, Mr. Das followed by sharing his 25+ years of field experience. He explained how Indian industry has pursued the goals of CSR in the past and how things are slowly changing and more and more formal procedures are being brought in. Mr. Das argued that it has become important for companies to have such initiatives, especially if the Indian legal system brings such activities under the purview of law in the near future, as is done in the United States.

Mr. Debi Goenka then spoke at length about the role NGO's have traditionally played in such initiatives. He also argued that CSR initiatives should be much more than just eyewash to impress customers and real concrete work is still missing in this area. Mr. Goenka explained how setting up of solar energy units, or rain water harvesting programs would not help much as the problem is of a much higher magnitude and these provide only limited relief. It was interesting to see Prof. Unnikrishnan provide a glimpse of the flip side of the coin by detailing all other non-conventional sources of energy that were available or under development. But both agreed that a lot more has to be done and the current work in this area is highly inadequate.

During the discussion, there was a mention of the difference in living standards of the developed countries and those in developing countries like India and China. The argument that if all people target high living standards, several more earths would be needed to provide the resources and was quite interesting. So the basic objective of indiscriminate development just for financial reasons has to be checked.  Panelists also discussed interesting ideas line- industries should stick to their core competency & leaving CSR initiatives to NGO's who have sufficient exposure & experience in the field by providing enough corpus funds.

It is normally thought that a company would not be considering anything other than profit and consumers while designing a product. But it seems that line of thought is not entirely true. Mr. Baxi shed light on how companies have gone to great extents in the past to modify their products or processes so that they are better for the society in general and do not harm the environment.

Designing for better disposal, reusability and recyclability are just some of the things companies are actively considering today. As he rightly put, if you are able to clean your own house and put your actions in order, much of your corporate social responsibility can be taken care of. Its more a matter of your mental outlook than a set of procedures. He gave numerous examples to state his point, like the single use cameras being sold by Kodak in China which are almost 90% reusable material and of how the advent of digital revolution is just transferring the waste from chemical to electronic and not actually curing the problem of wastage.

Mr. Baxi also explained about the differences between philanthropic activities of companies and CSR. He then went on to show how various CSR initiatives turn out to be cost effective & work as profit centers. He emphasized on the point that there should be a global standard acceptance when it comes to the SHE policies. He urged the budding managers in the audience to broaden their thinking and develop a holistic view about business development.

This Samiksha brought out the unanimous view of academic, corporate as well as NGO community that CSR, though in its nascent stage, is being practiced in India and it will surely pick up in the years to come. The revealed that the corporate world is realizing their social obligations and coming out of myopic objective of profit maximization.

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Sandeep Srivastava - This Samiksha gave me an interesting insight that CSR is not something limited to corporate literature but instead MNCs and Indian Companies are slowly and steadily practicing it at different level of their operation starting from selection of their suppliers till disposal of their products and NGOs do play a vital role in this cause by bringing up mass awareness among the stakeholders.

By Tanveer Singh
PGDISEM
NITIE
E-mail: impress.nitie@gmail.com
 

Source: E-mail March 23, 2006

published on IndianMBA.com on March 25, 2006

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