The recent expansion of CSR activities, particularly in the realm of healthcare and social welfare, signifies a pivotal shift in corporate responsibility.

By Dr Rana Singh

Healthcare is becoming an important focus area by the central government, the corporate entities and various other state governments.

Expansion of CSR Activities in Healthcare

The new companies law stipulates that the activities undertaken by corporates to promote healthcare will be considered as social welfare activity has opened the floodgate of opportunities to the corporate world in the area of healthcare.

CSR Focus on Healthcare and Social Welfare

Needless to mention that the healthcare facilities in India still needs to go a long way to deliver quality and diversified services to the various strata of the society. The Schedule VII of the notification notified recently, mentioned that “eradicating hunger, poverty and malnutrition, promoting preventive healthcare and sanitation and making available safe drinking water”, among others would come under the CSR ambit.

Challenges and Opportunities in CSR Implementation

These new areas that have been brought under the ambit of CSR pose a new set of challenges and opportunities to the corporate world. The organisations focusing on preventive healthcare will be contributing in a big way to the health of people by bringing to light the various risk dimensions of various diseases by multidimensional profiling of diseases so that the patients get an advanced signal of the probable risk of diseases.

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Extending Healthcare Facilities and Addressing Social Inequalities

This will help in extending the healthcare facilities to various strata of the society thereby bridging the social inequalities and shall also enhance the life expectancy rate and minimise the mortality rate in the rural and semi urban areas. The step to include ecological balance, protection of flora and fauna, animal welfare, agro-forestry, conservation of natural resources and maintaining quality of soil, air and water by the corporate affairs ministry is highly commendable.

CSR Contribution to Ecological Balance

This will help the society in managing the ecological balance and making the planet a better place to live for living beings. This also creates an opportunity for the corporate entities to focus on maintaining and sustaining ecological balance in their respective geographical areas.

CSR Strategies in the Face of Regulatory Changes

The rapidly changing regulatory environment is creating new sets of challenges and opportunities to the corporate world along with an ever growing challenge of re-aligning the CSR strategies, policies, programmes and models dynamically aligned with the expectations and regulations of the regulatory bodies and the government.

I wish good luck to all CSR professionals in their mission to achieve success.

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