The CSR landscape in the country is at the crossroads. The conventional wisdom lists four motivations for doing CSR (Porter and Crammer, Harvard Business Review 2016) i.e.
1) Moral obligations
2) Sustainability
3) License to operate.
4) Reputation or brand building?
In India however, the Responsibility has morphed into a legal mandate with a specter of criminalization even for an inadvertent deficiency. This puts the PSEs in bit of a spot. Their CSR spend should not only be compliant, scalable and impactful it should also be ‘safe’ – from the audit, vigilance and tax angle, judged in hindsight, years after the retirement of a decision maker.
Yet, CSR has a considerable potential to be a game changer in many ways in the society, if it creates an eco-system for fast tracking various best practices that have been tried and tested. Within the gamut of such best practices, one would like to focus on the adoption, propagation and pilot level scaling up of various innovative technologies that could benefit the society at large. Such an exercise done by a PSE, can then pave the way for the others to follow the example in a fast-track mode.
This approach is all the more relevant for the rural segment. We fall considerably short of various benchmarks as a country. Our third-party logistics cost is very high. Our wastage of fruit and vegetables and food grains remains unacceptably high. Our primary producers, farmers for example, do not get the price of their product in the absence of a farmer-friendly supply chain. Our adoption of improved technologies and new ways of doing things remains low. At the same time, we boast of one of the largest pools of science and technology personnel. But their societal connect leaves a lot to be desired.
There are individual examples of such best practices. One can readily cite following technologies identified by the Rural Technology Action Group(RuTAG) at IIT Bombay and supported by the CIL and other PSEs whose dissemination potential is 100 times more be it a subjee cooler, a Silicon Cups for menstrual hygiene or a Chironji decorticator.
But how do we realize such 100x potential within the bounds of the GFR and other oversight mechanisms? An innovation is by its very nature proprietary. The innovator cannot get you three quotations. Even if these innovations are developed within an Institute, say an IIT, the task of developing a large vendor base for competitive bidding raises a chicken and the egg scenario. The correct price discovery will not happen unless there is a larger vendor base. But such a vendor base will get created only when a critical mass of orders is placed. PSEs need to create such an eco-system of supporting generation of engineering drawings, a critical order volume by joining hands and using the nomination facilities. Creating a SoP for inviting bids after the pilot level scale up is done, does then become feasible.
SCOPE can be an ideal entity to support such efforts in a systematic and coordinated manner. All they need to do is to bring together on a trusted platform policy makers, scientists, NGOs and CSR Heads for presentation of tried and tested technological innovation and then leave it to the stakeholders to negotiate adoption of these technologies. But it must track, catalogue and put on a common accessible web-site the results, the SoPs and assessment details. This will go a long way in fast tracking such best practices.
Can SCOPE use a digital tool to do so? CTARA IITB are already in the process of designing such a tool for CIL. Other PSEs can adopt it.
Let us join hands together and fast track the best practices in adopting innovative rural technologies. An ounce of practice from our side will be better than a ton of theory that we may espouse.