Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal has said that the large corporates in India should recuse themselves from award ceremonies and instead encourage smaller companies and people who really need to be encouraged.
"May be a good idea if all the big corporates of this country decide to recuse themselves from awards because they are already doing a good job, they have already reached a certain scale and level, but nevertheless what we need to do is take this to people who really need to be encouraged," he said while inaugurating a CSR Awards-cum-Summit organised by ASSOCHAM here.
Goyal also informed that he had opposed making two percent corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending by private firms mandatory when it had come to the Parliamentary Standing Committee of Finance for review of the company's law amendment.
"I genuinely believe that CSR is not something that you force down somebody's throat because the moment there is something which is made mandatory then it becomes ritualistic and could often also become just a way to create a fassad or fill in a document or a form but will not necessarily do the kind of benefit to the society that one should really be wanting to," said Goyal.
"So I oppose it because I say, even if we want to do it, it should be suggestive and we should encourage more and more people to go down that path rather than force it down and then the peer pressure will set in," he added.
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"I personally feel, two per cent has become a budget which is a restraint, a budget is not something which means that you are going to spend that," he further said.
Giving an example of the Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana (UDAY) scheme of his ministry, Goyal said, "The UDAY scheme I brought in for power sector reforms, typically, should have been done in the past by force, it should be mandatory and you tell states that you better sign up and you will get the benefits of this only if you sign up, by force, I made it optional, nothing mandatory and almost every state is signing now."
"If your intention is pure, your heart is pure, your objective is clear and what you are doing can demonstrably good for rest of the people or for the other stakeholders then there it is not necessary to make anything mandatory," he added.
"My own sense is keeping voluntary would have probably encouraged people to think more," he further said.
Talking about the CSR initiatives undertaken by the public sector undertakings (PSUs), Goyal said that PSUs have been doing CSR well before the Companies Law Amendment came in, so for PSUs CSR is not something that the law mandated two years ago.
He informed that PSUs in the Power Ministry alone, in the last 1.5 years have spent Rs 2,200 crores on CSR to make over 1.20 lakh toilets in rural schools in remote areas.
