Every day, hundreds of millions of Indians sit down to a meal without a real way of knowing what is in it. That uncertainty is no longer a fringe worry; it is a documented, worsening public health emergency. Recent Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) data show that roughly one in five to…
Rs. 2.3 lakh crore. The number is so large it loses meaning. Azim Premji has committed to philanthropy throughout his giving career. He transferred Wipro shares and publicly declared a pledge to give away most of his wealth. To put it in perspective, it is more than India’s total annual expenditure on education for several…
CSR has a money problem. It is almost always described in rupees and crores, as if writing a cheque were the same thing as producing change. TCS has spent several years building an argument for a different unit of measurement: hours. In its 2025 fiscal year, TCS employees worldwide volunteered 8.9 million hours, representing a…
The queue outside a Netranjali eye camp at a truck stop in Maharashtra begins to form before the team sets up equipment. The men standing in it are long-distance truckers spending 12-hour days staring at roads. They often deal with uncorrected vision problems; they have neither the time nor the money to fix them at…
Most people at 21 are still deciding what to do with their degree. Tanuj Samaddar, at the same age, was already a two-time President’s Awardee, a published author, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the CEO of a media house, and a Commonwealth Scholar. He was also running Action for a Resilient Tomorrow,…
New Delhi: The Union Ministry of Education, working with the Ministry of External Affairs, opened the two-day BRICS Bharat Innovates (BBI) Exposition at Bharat Mandapam on September 11, putting 37 Indian deep-tech startups before CEOs, investors, and government delegations gathered ahead of the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12-13. The ventures were drawn from an…
Sudha Murty famously travels to project sites herself, often unannounced. She has described spending roughly 20 days a month on the road in the years she actively ran Infosys’ field operations. She visited schools, hospitals, flood relief sites, and destitute homes to verify that the money the foundation disbursed actually produced the intended outcome. This…
New Delhi and the 10-nation bloc chart a food-security roadmap through 2030, but a modest track record raises questions about whether the pledges will reach the smallholders they name. NEW DELHI— India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations concluded the 9th ASEAN-India Ministerial Meeting on Agriculture and Forestry on September 9, setting the stage…
He was 19 years old when he decided the problem he most wanted to spend his life on was this one: in India, a student’s address determines her destiny more than her intelligence. Dr Ketan Deshpande, an MBA from SCMHRD, Pune, and later a PhD researcher in Corporate Social Responsibility at Symbiosis International University, founded…
India’s CSR sector is not short of large numbers. Thousands of crores move annually through compliance-driven corporate spending, much of it legitimate, some of it difficult to trace back to any measurable human outcome. HCL Foundation, the CSR arm of HCL Tech, chaired by Roshni Nadar Malhotra, has spent a decade building a counterargument to…
