India CSR News Network

‘Time To Think Fresh – Innovative Models; Mass Impact Solutions’ is a Chapter authored by Sridhar Iyer in the book Corporate Social Responsibility in India: Cases and Developments after the Legal Mandate edited by Ms. Nayan Mitra and Dr. Rene Schmidpeter and published by Springer International Publishing, Switzerland under its CSR, Sustainability, Ethics and Governance series. The Book is available both in e-version and hard copy from Springer as well as Amazon and many other online book stores all over the world. The abstract of the chapter is as follows:

Abstract: The passing of the CSR mandate in the Companies Act, 2013 has brought about a unique opportunity before organizations in India to innovate on models that can impact at scale, yet be frugal in terms of costs and yet bring about speed and rigour in implementation. Some of the opportunities include but not limit to enrolling children from financially deprived families in private schools by making use of the 25 percent quota under the Right of children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) Act, 2010; improving the learning levels in the government schools by making the government system the principal stakeholder in the intervention or; by empowering Women Federations in rural India to make them self-sustaining. This paper seeks to critically analyze and explain these unique opportunities for the Indian corporations through high impact, high return innovative models, that can successfully unleash the true potential of India. These same models can be replicated in other sectors like health, nutrition and so on.

Keywords: Self-Sustainable, Women Federations, Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) Act 2010, Improving Learning, Government Schools

Author brief:

Mr. Sridhar Iyer is a finance professional and has been associated with the Ernst & Young (EY) Foundation for more than nine years. Prior to joining the foundation, he was the National Director – Finance in EY. The shift from a finance role to the social sector was prompted both with his desire to give back to society (especially considering the larger platform provided by EY) as also with a desire to try and infuse a process driven culture in the project areas. He has been working towards promoting low cost, mass impact and sustainable models and attempting to place the beneficiary as the key participant instead of merely being a recipient.