Track: Sustainability

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) aim to target different stakeholders including businesses and development agencies like NGOs into doing more and better with less. The SDGs are inspiring many people; they are referred very often in business conferences. Society recalls them frequently and the government is also citing them. The implementation of SDGs needs every government and corporates to judiciously prioritize, capacities and resources available. The question for corporations is how the stakeholders can work together more effectively to achieve them. India over the past few years directed its development to meets its priorities in many areas like employment, food, water, education, and energy. In this paper, the researchers are exploring how corporates in India are aligned with SDGs as they are through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The study assesses the annual report of each of these Indian companies through their CSR activities and extracts all the CSR activities according to the various thematic areas. Then they map and align all these CSR themes to the 17 SDGs. This mapping exercise develops the knowledge and explores the specific SDGs these companies are focused on. The researchers are also trying to explore the convergence between SDGs and existing initiates within companies towards CSR and SDG. This study is also foundational exercise in the assessment of CSR towards SDGs in India. The study looked at 58 Government-owned companies, also called Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSE). These 58 companies comprised of various sectors like Energy, Oils, Financials, Telecom and IT.