CSR Conclave 2026: Reforming Corporate Giving for India

Picture a room full of the people who quite literally move Indian capital, a former SEBI chairman, a former TCS chief, bank foundation heads, a state education minister and ask them one uncomfortable question: if your company gave away thousands of crores last year, can you actually prove it changed a single life for the better?

That was the mood on the evening of 16 July 2026, when the Second Edition of the CSR Conclave “Reforming CSR for Viksit Bharat”, opened its doors at the Sai Krishnan Premamrutham Hall in Sathya Sai Grama, Muddenahalli. Organised by the One World One Family Mission in partnership with The Hindu BusinessLine, this wasn’t a polite corporate seminar with canned panels and candid talks. Over two days, it turned into something rarer: a genuinely honest argument about whether India’s ₹35,000-crore-a-year CSR machine is actually working and what it would take to fix it.

The timing couldn’t have been sharper. Just weeks earlier, on 27 May 2026, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs had notified a rule allowing companies to route up to 10% of their CSR obligation through Zero Coupon Zero Principal instruments on the Social Stock Exchange, a move that could unlock over ₹3,500 crore of transparent social capital almost overnight. Everyone in that hall knew the reform had just handed them a live wire. The only question was who would pick it up first, and how.

He offered a single line that panellists kept quoting back to each other for the rest of the two days: “the compass matters more than the clock.”

It sounds simple until you sit with it. Ramadorai’s point was that CSR keeps getting judged by annual timelines and quarterly optics, when what it actually needs is direction that holds steady for a decade. 

“Good policies create possibilities,” he said, “while well-designed ecosystems transform those possibilities into long-lasting outcomes.” 

And in case anyone thought this was abstract philosophy, he grounded it in something concrete: “the greatest asset of any nation is its human capital.” Not infrastructure. Not capital markets. People.

That set up the next speaker perfectly because if human capital is the asset, someone in the room needed to explain how CSR had actually treated it over the last decade.

Sri M. Damodaran remembers exactly how reluctantly Indian industry accepted the 2013 mandate and how long it took for that reluctance to fade. 

“It took quite a while for it to move from being an accounting entry to an affair of the heart,” he told the gathering, describing a shift from grudging compliance to something closer to genuine conviction, anchored in nutrition, health, and education. Having toured the Mission’s campus himself, he didn’t hide his own surprise: 

“This is a phenomenal journey… something that elevates the concept of who we are as human beings.”

It’s one thing to say hearts have changed. It’s another to check whether the money that follows those hearts is actually being spent. That’s exactly where the conversation went next.

Sri S. Ravi deals in numbers, and the number he brought to the stage was uncomfortable. “Twenty percent of the CSR every year… is unspent,” he said, “and sometimes it is even 30 percent.” Not because companies don’t want to give, he clarified, but because they simply can’t find enough capable organisations to implement the money responsibly. He admitted the Mission had genuinely surprised him: 

“I did not know that there is another type of world where service and contributing to society is the most important aspect.”

So if 20–30% of India’s CSR money is sitting idle for lack of the right partners, the obvious next question is: what’s actually broken in the plumbing between donors and doers? The next person at the podium had already spent years thinking about exactly that.

Sri K. R. Lakshminarayana, laid out the social sector’s dysfunction as four tangled problems: scale, trust, consistency, and what he bluntly called “plumbing”,  the mismatch between where capital sits and where it’s actually needed. His conclusion pointed straight at the platform everyone in the room had come to debate: 

“The one institutional mechanism that India created but has not lived its potential, is a social stock exchange.”

It was a fitting handoff to the next speaker, who has spent his career explaining exactly why journalists and the public should start paying attention to that mechanism.

Sri Raghuvir Srinivasan, said “I firmly believe that the time has now come for CSR to take over and fly high in India,” but not without a warning attached to the optimism. Development statistics, he reminded the room, mean nothing on their own: 

“Vikas is good… but Viksit Bharat cannot happen unless the last man or the last woman in the last row is uplifted.”

That idea of the “last row”, the people development statistics routinely miss — became the bridge into the next speaker’s argument, which was really a challenge to think bigger than any single CSR budget.

Shashi Kiran Shetty pushed the room past incremental thinking entirely. 

“How do we ensure that social capital grows with the same ambition, scale, and urgency as economic capital?” 

He asked a question that landed hard in a hall full of people used to measuring success in quarterly economic growth numbers. His prescription was equally direct: a shift “from projects to platforms,” so that scattered, well-meaning CSR initiatives could finally combine into institutions large enough to matter nationally.

Platforms, of course, only work if every region gets a seat at the table and that’s precisely the gap the evening’s final speaker had travelled hundreds of kilometres to point out.

Shri Mithilesh Kumar Tiwari delivered one of the evening’s most personal addresses. He reminded the audience, gently but pointedly, that Bihar, a state with an ancient legacy of knowledge and learning receives among the lowest CSR allocations of any state in India. His message wasn’t a complaint; it was an invitation, urging the Mission to bring its free healthcare, education, and nutrition model to Bihar and insisting that Viksit Bharat 2047 simply cannot happen if entire states are left out of the conversation.

Day Two opened by questioning whether intent is even the right starting point. Mr Vineet Nayar, took the stage with an idea he called “human technology.” “The spirit of service cannot be mandated,” he said, before posing a question that visibly landed: 

“Why do they go on Sunday and spend their own time and feel blessed… and Monday they go into an organisation, get paid, and feel bad about it?”

His answer was purpose, not compliance, not compensation. Nayar argued that scaling real social impact requires design thinking, genuine partnership with government rather than criticism of it, and organisations built around one uncompromising belief: that they exist for the beneficiary, not for their own brand. It was the perfect provocation to set up what came next: four panels that spent the rest of the day stress-testing exactly how far purpose alone can carry an entire reform agenda.

The first panel put the Social Stock Exchange itself under the microscope. In three-and-a-half years, it had raised barely ₹45 crore and most of that from donors who weren’t even routing CSR money through it. So why the optimism now? Because the new 10% CSR rule finally gives the platform real fuel. The conversation moved quickly into the mechanics: Zero Coupon Zero Principal bonds that let donors keep their principal while directing only the returns to social causes, recent cuts to minimum investment thresholds to widen retail participation, and the friction still slowing everything down, high listing and advisory costs, and an ecosystem still tilted toward large, well-connected non-profits. Ideas on the table ranged from mandating a minimum CSR-to-SSE allocation, to subsidising advisory costs through a dedicated capacity-building fund, to treating retail social giving the way India learned to treat mutual fund SIPs as a habit, not a one-off donation.

The second panel turned the lens outward, to India’s 35-million-strong diaspora, which sends home more than $135 billion a year and gives an estimated $4–5 billion annually to philanthropic causes. The panel’s real insight was reframing the problem itself: this isn’t a shortage of willing global capital, it’s a “plumbing” failure, poor awareness, tight regulatory gatekeeping, and a fragmented base of small NGOs that simply can’t absorb large donations efficiently. Panellists were careful not to dismiss the security concerns behind India’s tightened foreign-funding rules, but proposed structural workarounds instead: routing diaspora capital through GIFT City’s international finance mechanisms, pooling FCRA-approved organisations into fund-like structures to cut compliance overhead, and opening the Social Stock Exchange directly to NRI investors. The underlying shift in thinking was memorable: stop treating this as a fundraising problem, and start treating it as a people-mobilisation problem. Get more people emotionally invested first; the capital tends to follow.

The third panel confronted maybe the hardest truth of the entire conclave: India has roughly 3 million NGOs, and almost no comparable, trustworthy evidence of which ones actually deliver results. The discussion drew a sharp line between outputs, the number of activities completed and outcomes, the actual, measurable change in someone’s life and admitted that most CSR reporting today still counts the former while calling it the latter. The proposed fix was a two-layer system: a common governance baseline covering financial discipline and board quality, layered with sector-specific outcome metrics tailored to education, healthcare, or livelihoods. But the panel was equally honest about the obstacles, many rural and grassroots NGOs simply lack the reporting sophistication funders now expect, and formal rating agencies may not see enough commercial upside to build proper rating products for this space yet. A recurring theme was closer to home than regulation: CSR committees inside corporate boardrooms need to be taken more seriously, staffed with people who actually understand the sector, rather than treated as a lesser committee assignment.

The fourth and final panel asked the boldest question of the two days: can CSR and the SSE together actually shape India’s future GDP? The scale problem was laid bare immediately, India’s entire annual CSR spend is a tiny fraction of its tax revenue, while child undernutrition alone is estimated to cost the country 2–3% of GDP every year. The geography was just as stark: 60% of CSR money flows into only six states, and even within those states, well-connected cities crowd out neglected districts. The debate turned pointed at moments, with sharp questions about whether CSR reform can meaningfully substitute for slower, harder structural reforms in water policy, agriculture, and job creation. But the panel also grounded itself in real, working examples, water tables rejuvenated through CSR-funded projects, skilling programmes tied directly to actual employment outcomes, and disaster-response equipment funded and deployed on the ground. The panel eventually converged on four qualities every serious CSR programme needs depth, scale, sustainability, and inclusivity and floated a genuinely fresh idea: extend CSR contribution beyond the company itself, pulling in employees, vendors, and dealers, so that social responsibility becomes a shared ecosystem habit rather than a single line item on one balance sheet.

Often across the two days, the conversation would return to Sadguru Sri Madhusudan Sai, whose vision quietly reframed everything the economists and regulators had just spent hours debating. His idea of Viksit Bharat went beyond every metric in the room: 

“May all be happy. May all be healthy. May all see good and auspicious things everywhere. May no one have any sorrow,” 

he said, adding that “beyond GDPs and GNPs, beyond CSRs… what truly lies at the heart of a Viksit Bharat is this idea.” He offered a measure of progress no spreadsheet could capture, “survival of the weakest,” not the fittest insisting that a handful of billionaires pushing up an average means nothing if the last child is still left behind.

Drawing on the Bhagavad Gita, he gave corporate India a reframe of its own responsibilities that stuck with the room long after he sat down: a business that genuinely solves a problem is performing yajna, and profit is simply its natural byproduct. Going beyond statutory duty, the extra mile of CSR is dana, or charity. And running an organisation within the bounds of ethics and good governance is tapas. “We don’t call it expenditure at all,” he said, describing how the Mission talks about the funds it receives. “You should always call it a social investment.” He closed with a thought that felt like it was written for exactly this audience: giving, in the Indian tradition, never really ends, “even when you end, that is the idea of India.”

With the evening’s addresses complete, the Mission turned to recognising the companies already walking the talk. The Viksit Bharat CSR Leadership Award 2026 honoured sixteen organisations, ABB, A.P. Moller–Maersk, Axis Bank, Catalyst Brands, Epson India, ICICI Foundation, Indian Oil Corporation, o9 Solutions, P D Navkar Bio-Chem, Persistent Foundation, PJ Margo, SanDisk India, Sasken Technologies, The Hans Foundation, Vettiyil Packaging, and Volvo Group India for sustained, three-year partnerships with the Mission.

One thing was clear: India isn’t short on goodwill, capital, or ambition. What it’s been missing is the plumbing to connect the three, efficiently, transparently, and at a scale that actually moves the needle on a country of 1.4 billion people. The conclave closed with the release of a White Paper “Reforming CSR for a Viksit Bharat”, headed to the Government of India, which Sri Ramadorai summed up in a single sentence: “not just a set of recommendations, it is a pledge to stop treating generosity as a duty to discharge, and to begin treating it as a nation to build.”

The discussions at Muddenahalli have set the direction, but turning those ideas into policy now rests with policymakers. If they do, India’s next chapter in CSR could move beyond regulatory compliance toward meaningful social investment. More importantly, it could mark a broader shift toward ensuring that the benefits of economic growth reach the communities that need them most.