Education and employable skills are major investment areas by most of the information technology (IT) and financial service sector companies under corporate social responsibility (CSR), revealed a report by Nasscom Foundation.
Nasscom foundation report titled as “Catalysing Change Through CSR” was released on September 22, 2017 at the CSR Leadership Conference. The report says, “About half the companies (70) interviewed have spent more than 70 per cent of their CSR in education and employable skills initiatives”.
Big corporate firms such as Sonata Software, Hinduja Global Solutions, Wipro, HP Inc, Tech Mahindra, Cognizant Technologies, Mphasis, and Aricent were featured in the survey.
Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman, Nasscom Foundation, said, “Education and employable skills are the key to most of India’s social problems. An industry, which has grown solely by investing into knowledge and key skills, realises the difference a skilled knowledge society can make and therefore, a major chunk of the CSR funds has been dedicated to education and employable skills”.
According to the report, more than half of the companies based in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharahstra, Telangana and the National Capital Region, are now also investing areas other than non-headquarter geographies.
The report, which maps the spending trend in the third year of operationalisation of the CSR mandate, also noted that companies were placing greater importance on monitoring the outcome by integrating technology.
“Companies have become increasingly aware of outcome assessment and close monitoring implementing agencies as evidenced by the growing frequency of report submissions from partner organisations, and greater on-ground frequency of CSR team,” the report added.
