PUNE: After higher education, the state government has now introduced a dedicated policy for the implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities associated with the school education and sports department.
Setting up a ‘single-window’ approach to facilitate and streamline the proposed CSR activities from the corporate sector at Mantralaya is one of the key provisions of the policy, which has been notified by the government through a government resolution (GR) on Monday.”
“The provision regarding CSR in the New Companies Act 2013 has brought within its ambit all the companies with at least Rs 5-crore net profit or Rs 1,000-crore turnover or Rs 500-crore network, making its mandatory for them to spend 2 per cent of the three years’ average net profit on CSR activities.
This present a big opportunity for the department to seek CSR funding, further accentuating the need to have a full-fledged CSR policy,” reads the GR.
As part of the policy, a state-level CSR committee, having secretary, school education and sports department, as its chairman, will be formed. It will have education commissioner and sports commissioner among the six members with deputy secretary (training) as member secretary.
Creating a framework for management and facilitation of school-related CSR activities, evaluating and approving requests for CSR activities by reviewing the need/issues as well as proposing plan, timelines and projected outcomes, and other relevant enablers in the School Education System and sharing best practices of successful CSR initiatives from within and outside of the state are some of the major roles the state-level committee is expected to carry out.
In addition to a state-level committee, a CSR committee at the level of commissionerate and divisional authorities will be also formed to facilitate and monitor effective implementation of the policy. The CSR activities, which will be supported by the CSR Cell and various committees, are broadly divided into three categories – infrastructure and school development institutes; student development and capability building of teachers; school management and state institutes.
The government, in January this year, has already framed a policy for acceptance of funds under CSR in the field of higher education. Deputy Director of Education (Pune Division) Suman Shinde said the CSR policy would help in effective utilisation of CSR funds for welfare of students and other stakeholder”. “The corporate houses come out with novel innovative ideas for implementation of CSR activities in the field of education sector. The dedicated policy would help in desired implementation of these ideas,” she said.
(Express News Service, 9 June 2014)
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