Going green can help
Veerappa Moily, minister of corporate affairs, spoke at the Mint conclave.
Edited excerpts of the speech:
There needs to be a ground swell of sensitivities to responsible business across consumers, academia, media and social organizations. Shared values and coordinated efforts are the only way to achieve business responsibility. In fact, competing businesses can collaborate on sustainability efforts to lower the risk involved in adopting new technologies and management practices. Going green together can help many industries win social approval, attract the brightest young talent and also to prevent expensive lawsuits and resolve conflicts and confrontations. In fact, the ministry, with all the guidance that we have received, through the debates and churning the ideas involved in the formulation of a national policy and guidelines on this important subject. We do not want to be rigid on that, we would like to be pragmatic on this and, in fact, evolve this system instead of imposing this system. I would rather say that this concept of trusteeship is already there in Indian psyche. And this is only to ignite that feeling, motivate them to act upon it that�s why we believe in issuing guidelines.
We have issued national voluntary guidelines on social, environment and economic responsibilities of business 2011 as well as the proposed section on CSR(corporate social responsibility) in the new Companies Bill, whose agenda was to make it impact-oriented and measurable. Even in that Bill, we said that reporting is mandatory, but the implementation is not mandatory. And the reporting will definitely make corporate bodies, you know when they are exposed and when they have made profit on all the three years and parting away with 2%, I think that frame which was well crafted and chiselled out, now I can boldly say that there is a national consensus on that. So I am very happy that this will definitely be done. And even the standing committee, which has again re-examined this aspect, shall ensure spending of 2%.
India has asserted the importance of alleviating poverty and actualizing social empowerment, these aspects cannot be delinked from environment or the growth story of a country. Even the recently concluded Rio summit reiterated some of these social responsibilities. In fact, they say we acknowledge that implementation of sustainable development will depend on the active engagement of both the public and private sector. I must say that even now that public sector has come forward to provide 3% and not 2% and they have made it mandatory.