Infosys and Corporate Social Responsibility in India

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                                                   INFOSYS

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is defined as a business’s policy to encourage positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities and all other member of the public who may be considered its stakeholders. [8]

Analysis

The Infosys Foundation

The Infosys Foundation was established in the year 1996 with the goal of serving the under-privileged sections of the society

The focus areas of the foundation are:

Learning and education

in 2007, the foundation embarked on the 'Library for Every Rural School' program to get people to donate books in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, and Kerala. It has since set up 35,000 school libraries, the largest rural education program in India.

Healthcare

Since its inception in 1996, the foundation has constructed hospital wards, donated medicines and advanced medical equipment to hospitals, and organized health camps in remote areas, all in order to get the under-privileged access to modern medical practices.

Arts & Culture

The Infosys Foundation sustains and preserves several art forms that are unique to our country and form a part of our heritage. Over the years it has sponsored art and music shows by rural artists, sponsored documentaries on Indian culture and published books that delineate the roots of art in Karnataka.

Social Rehabilitation and Rural Uplift

The foundation works for the welfare of destitute women and children and also helps towards developing rural India by providing education and vocational skills. It has built orphanages where education is prioritized and organized training centres for destitute women in and around Karnataka.

Assessment

There are a number of observations to be made from the above. Firstly, Infosys is seen to be engaged in various, unconnected welfare activities. Though laudable, this may not be the best policy to adopt towards CSR because many of these have little or no relevance to its core business ability. Thus, there is a chance that it may drop them in the future if aspects of the activities start to clash with their normal business working. This will damage the entire premise of sustainability that the company promotes about its CSR.

The extremely local nature of these activities (most are based in and around Karnataka) show that Infosys is perhaps trying to build a good relationship at home where it wants to address as many problems as possible. However, scaling up of these activities will be the real test of its CSR practices because being a global company it cannot afford to limit its welfare activities to only one region. This may raise questions about their sincerity as their efforts may be construed as simply trying to appease the authorities at home and maybe get benefits over its competition.

In the next section we will see that in matters in which it has expertise, Infosys has already expanded its activities to the global level.

Sustainable Social Change

Infosys makes the proud claim of influencing sustainable social change through its varied development initiatives. [1] The following are some of these initiatives:

Education and Intellectual Capability

It is no secret that India is engineering-mad with Indian Engineering Institutions churning out over 500,000 science and engineering graduates every year. However, even as rival IT companies and a host of other recruiters vie with Infosys over the recruitment of the fresh, inexpensive engineering talent, there is little that these corporates have done to aid in the recognition and reward of top Indian research. This is a matter of pressing concern because not only does this hamper the intellectual capital of our country in relation to competition from overseas (Even China has more PhD’s per capita than India) but it promotes a lack of systematic learning that ultimately results in making a lot of these graduates unfit for immediate industrial employment. It is here that Infosys has once again differentiated itself from the competition by undertaking ventures that promote science and engineering education as more than simply a means of landing a job.

The Infosys Science Foundation (ISF) was set up with the goal of achieving the above. It was set up by some of the company’s founder members in February 2009 with the aim to “elevate the prestige of scientific research in India and inspire young Indians to choose a vocation in scientific research”. The ISF honours outstanding contributions and achievements by Indians in various streams of science with the Infosys Prize in five categories: mathematical sciences, physical sciences, engineering and computer sciences, life sciences and social sciences. The award is given to Indian scientists below the age of 50. The Foundation is funded by an amount of Rs. 215,000,000 contributed by the members of the Infosys Board and an annual grant from Infosys Tech. Ltd. The annual award in each category amounts to Rs. 5,000,000. The importance of this award is highlighted by the names of its past winners and their achievements, for e.g. last year the award for Life Sciences went to Dr. Chetan Chitnis for having discovered the first viable malaria vaccine and the award for Engineering Sciences went to Prof. Ashutosh Sharma for his applications in energy storage.

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Along similar lines is the ACM – Infosys Foundation Award in Computer Sciences, established in August 2007 and carrying a cash award of USD 150,000 provided by the Infosys Foundation Endowment. It aims to reward educators and researchers whose work in software systems foster innovations that address existing challenges in the domain.

Assessment

Unlike a number of Indian companies whose education related welfare activities focus primarily on issues of primary/basic education, Infosys’ initiatives are unique in that they are associated exclusively with the domain of higher technical education, a segment in which it is arguably the most respected company in ...

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