The strengths and weaknesses of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mandate as a socio-economic game-changer are starkly in evidence in a useful audit report released today by the respected Mumbai-based social sector consultancy Samhita Social Ventures on corporate investments in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (or WASH) programmes. Titled "CSR in WASH: What are India's Top Companies Up To?" its broad findings seem to indicate that CSR tends to be constrained by the demands of shareholder value, and, therefore, afflicted by tokenism.
Corporate WASH programmes align well with the National Democratic Alliance's Swachh Bharat Mission, launched on October 2, 2014 with all the intensive mela-type publicity characteristic of this regime. The Mission, the United Progressive Alliance's Bharat Nirman programme by any other name, sought corporate participation for its target of eliminating open defecation in India by 2019 and proved handy for large companies looking to fulfil the CSR mandate under Section 135 of the Companies Act.
Samhita examined the programmes of 100 companies with the largest CSR budgets on the BSE 500 and found that they had "responded enthusiastically to the government's call-to-action". Ninety per cent of the sample reported at least one WASH programme in the past three years. The findings and recommendations of this insightful study, which can be found on samhita.org's Knowledge Centre, are expressed in remarkably frank language, no mean achievement since it was done under the aegis of the India Sanitation Coalition of FICCI. Industry lobbies by their nature are not prone to plainspeak.
It is interesting that the WASH programmes in the study rarely stray from the framework of broad corporate strategy, and they often mirror the government's priorities. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it also unwittingly underscores the limited ambit of CSR programmes, mandated or otherwise.
For instance, the study suggests that heavy engineering corporations (45 out of 46 in the top 100 sample) and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies (all five in the sample) were most likely to support WASH programmes. This is no mystery: heavy engineering corporations "have an incentive to provide facilities for communities residing around their factories", and FMCG companies make products like soap, detergent and sanitisers that relate to the WASH agenda. In contrast only a quarter of the IT and finance firms and health care firms reported WASH programmes.
Equally, the bulk of the WASH programmes were focused on states with high open defection rates - Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka. No coincidence, these are also India's most industrialised states where most corporations are likely to have their operations. But other states with notably high open defecation rates - Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Jammu & Kashmir - did not see similar levels of corporate participation.
Swachh Bharat is a rural sanitation programme. So were 52 per cent of corporate WASH programmes. Rural sanitation is needed but, as the report points out, urban sanitation is no less an urgent priority "in the face of growing slum populations with over 50 million people forced to defecate in the open" with all its concomitant threats to public health. Yet only 17 per cent of the companies in the sample reported working exclusively in urban areas.
Most significantly, the key weaknesses of Swachh Bharat/Bharat Nirman are almost identical to the corporate WASH programmes. The main one is the focus on toilet construction at the expense of influencing behavioural change. This is a genuine issue: in June 2014, an extensive survey called the SQUAT report by the Delhi-based Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) revealed the bizarre fact that most rural Indians with access to toilets don't use them, preferring to defecate in the open. This also applied to rural Indians who could afford to own a toilet.
Yet to the quote Samhita's report, "CSR in WASH is focused on the creation of infrastructure, but discounts software aspects such as behaviour change: Despite compelling evidence that the construction of toilets alone cannot eliminate open defecation, 75 per cent companies were supporting programs related to creating infrastructure…with little focus on programs aimed at influencing behaviour."
The report's suggested reasons for this shortcoming are enlightening: they could range from "perceiving behaviour change programs as high-risk due to difficulties quantifying and measuring impact, the long gestation period required and a lack of knowledge combined with construction-oriented targets defined by the government". Read that as: Latrine-building provides tangibility to a CSR programme; getting people to use those latrines is the harder part, an issue that demands longer time-frames and deeper, longer-term community work. Few companies are willing to invest such time and effort.
No surprise, then, that only 15 per cent of the sample reported including toilet repair and maintenance as part of their programmes and only about a fifth included behaviour change communication (BCC) in their programmes. But, says the WASH report, these exercises were far from satisfactory because they were limited to organising cleanliness drives and awareness programmes. "This trend indicates that even the few companies that are conducting BCC programs are doing so as a token gesture rather than from a commitment to influencing behaviour."
The real challenge of the CSR mandate, thus, lies in the transition from high-priced tokenism to genuine engagement.
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