Tata Group spends Rs 8000 crore on CSR in 10 years

MUMBAI: The Tata Group, which has been restructuring and realigning its philanthropic and corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to address emerging societal challenges and also conform with the new regulatory requirements on Tuesday revealed that it has spent in excess of Rs 8,000 crore on CSR activities over the last decade between a medley of Tata trusts and group companies.

Mukund Rajan, brand custodian and chief ethics officer of the Group, who also oversees the sustainability function, told media persons at a roundtable in Mumbai that the average spend on CSR in the last three years has been around Rs 1,000 crore a year in a ratio of 60:40 between the companies and trusts. The specific figure for Tata companies in 2013-14 stands at Rs 660 crore.

Even before the present set of mandatory CSR norms came into force, the group had been channeling a sizeable chunk of its profits back into the community as its business model had been designed for the purpose; 66% of the equity of Tata Sons, the holding company is held by philanthropic trusts.

Sustainability and giving back to society has been integral to the business philosophy of the group. Only now it's beginning to address CSR in a more strategic and focused manner across the group; the Tata Council for Community Initiatives (TCCI), for instance, has been disbanded and a new Tata Sustainability Group (TSG) has been created at Tata Sons under the tutelage of Shankar Venkateswaran, formerly with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The TSG will draw guidance from a new Global Sustainability Council chaired by Rajan and CEOs of major group companies as members.

As part of the group's strategy, efforts are on to put together a pan-India group-wide programme on skills building, the need of the hour for a country battling human capital challenges. This is expected to be a multi-stakeholder initiative with even the government playing its role. The traditional programmes of the group companies — on education, health and nutrition, livelihoods, biodiversity — continue.

TSG head Venkateswaran announced that the group will work across three major prongs — community development, environment, and disaster response. Having tested the waters on employee volunteering recently, which touched 25,000 volunteers, in 150 companies, across 60 countries and 540 locations, the group has decided to integrate volunteering as major component in its overall strategy for the future.

A 6-12-month sabbatical for employees to go out and engage with NGOs and institutions is also on the cards.