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…
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…
In 1978, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw began a business called Biocon out of her Bangalore garage with 10,000 in capital, and a product no one in India was making. It was for industrial applications derived from enzyme-based bio fermentation. She was rejected for a loan when a bank manager asked whether it would help her run a…
₹763 crore over 5 years. That is the number next to Rohini Nilekani’s name on the EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List 2025. She is also known as India’s Most Generous Woman, a title earned by donating ₹204 crore in a single financial year. The number is large enough to stop a conversation. However, Nilekani has…
Numbers rarely tell a warm story, but sometimes they confirm one. In Chhattisgarh’s Baloda Bazar district, a Divyang Centre was a place people with disabilities avoided. Because there was little worth visiting. Physiotherapy was patchy. Speech therapy barely existed. Then Ambuja Foundation, the rural development arm of Ambuja Cements and Adani Cement, folded the centre’s…
I Jyoti Agarwal n 2022, on an August day, in a small hall in Mumbai, Ratan Tata, aged eighty-four years old found himself among other elderly people and recent graduates. No inspiring speeches, celebrities, or grand philanthropic ventures took place at the event. Instead, it signified the beginning of a new venture, called Goodfellows, which…
Each CSR annual report from India now includes a photograph of women at a training centre holding certificates and smiling into the camera. In fact, the real question is what happens when the lens clicks off? Female labour force participation has, for example, risen from 23.3 percent to 41.7 percent in India from 2023-24 to…
In a corner of Chhattisgarh, the Vedanta Skill School, run under BALCO’s CSR program, has trained more than 15,000 rural youth. 83% of the 1,200 trainees have been placed in jobs over the past year alone. A few hundred kilometres away, HDFC Bank’s Parivartan initiative marked World Youth Skills Day 2026. It reported that its…
By early August 2026, roughly 481 villages across Assam had gone completely underwater. 90 relief camps were sheltering close to 30,000 people. Another 94 distribution centres supplied essentials to those who had not been evacuated. This is not Assam’s first devastating flood season. Unless something structural changes, it will not be its last. The death…
40,794 crore rupees. According to Bharat CSR Performance Report 2026, the expenditures of corporate India jumped 17% over the previous year, on social responsibility in FY 2024-25. This has pushes India’s cumulative CSR investment past ₹2.61 lakh crore since the mandate began. This feels like a triumph of policy on paper. However, peeling the back…
