Corporates are not spending to ‘clean Ganga’

Companies across India have spent little out of their total expenditure under Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two pet projects, the Clean India Mission and Namami Gange Programme, according to provisional CSR expenditure data for the 2016-17 fiscal.

However, the Centre is considering a proposal to ask private companies and PSUs to spend around 30% of CSR funds on the cleanliness programme. The data of CSR expenditure available on both the CSR web portal and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) website shows that the companies have spent less than 0.50% of their total expenditure on the Clean India Mission and Namami Gange Programme.

According to provisional data of CSR expenditure, 6,286 companies spent a total of Rs 4,719 crore, of which only Rs 83 crore and Rs 23 crore were spent on the Clean India Mission and Namami Gange Programme respectively. A total 11,597 CSR projects were undertaken by the companies in the 2016-17 fiscal. Under the Companies Act, 2013, the then UPA government made it mandatory for corporates having a net worth of Rs 500-1,000 crore turnover to spend at least 2% of their average net profit of the past three years on CSR activities.

The state wise CSR expenditure data shows that companies have spent the maximum under CSR in Maharashtra, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. With an expenditure of Rs 702 crore, Maharashtra tops the chart, while Bihar, Odisha and Rajasthan seem to have fallen behind in terms of CSR expenditure. The top CSR contributor companies are HDFC Bank Ltd, NTPC Ltd, ICICI Bank, Power Finance Corporation Ltd and Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd. With an expenditure of Rs 305 crore, HDFC Bank Ltd tops the chart of top 10 contributors in the 2016-17 fiscal.

The Clean India Mission, launched in 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is a campaign that aims to eliminate open defecation through construction of household-owned and community-owned toilets. It has the target of making India an open defecation free (ODF) country by 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, by constructing 90 million toilets in rural India. The Namami Gange Programme is an Integrated Conservation Mission of the Centre with a budget of Rs 20,000 crore.