In FY22, India s corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending on the environment more than doubled to ₹2,837 crore, which made the sector the biggest recipient of such funds after health and education, according to the latest provisional data by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Spending on health in FY22 stood at ₹9,987 crore, beating education as the top sector for CSR expenditure.
The encouraging trend of companies complying with their CSR obligations and many going beyond comes after legislative changes kicked in on 22 January 2021.
Despite small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) ability to contribute in achieving sustainable economic growth, to reduce unemployment, value creation ability of SMEs through CSR remains unexplored. We examine the impact of CSR on SME value in manufacturing and service industries context, the industries ignored by existing research. We also explore the interactive relationship of CSR and access to finance and their impact on CSR-Value relationship. Our key finding is that SMEs value is positively associated with the CSR expenditure and access to finance. The results indicate that current year CSR expenditure creates value for SMEs through improving their access to finance and ultimately improving their sales in the next year but do not moderate the CSR-Value relationship . Our results are robust and reliable because we employed both 2SLS and generalised method of moments (GMM) approaches to address possible endogeneity. Moreover, we use actual CSR spending data from developing countr
The due date for reporting CSR compliance in a new format introduced in February is the end of March after the penalty provision for defaulting on spending obligation came into effect in January 2021