Healthcare is becoming an important focus area by the central government, the
corporate entities and various other state governments.
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.
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.
These new areas that have been brought under the ambit of CSR poses 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 multi
dimensional profiling of diseases so that the patients get an advanced signal of the
probable risk of diseases.
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.
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.
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.
(Dr Rana Singh is the Co-Founder and CEO at India CSR)
