NITIE, Mumbai Plays Host to Another Samiksha

NITIE, Mumbai Plays Host to Another Samiksha
Theme: "Corporate Social Responsibility: A Reality or an Illusion"

Mr. Debi Goenka then spoke at length about the role NGO's have traditionally played in such initiatives. He also argued that CSR initiatives should be much more than just eyewash to impress customers and real concrete work is still missing in this area. Mr. Goenka explained how setting up of solar energy units, or rain water harvesting programs would not help much as the problem is of a much higher magnitude and these provide only limited relief.

It was interesting to see Prof. Unnikrishnan provide a glimpse of the flip side of the coin by detailing all other non-conventional sources of energy that were available or under development. But both agreed that a lot more has to be done and the current work in this area is highly inadequate.

During the discussion, there was a mention of the difference in living standards of the developed countries and those in developing countries like India and China. The argument that if all people target high living standards, several more earths would be needed to provide the resources and was quite interesting. So the basic objective of indiscriminate development just for financial reasons has to be checked. Panelists also discussed interesting ideas line- industries should stick to their core competency & leaving CSR initiatives to NGO's who have sufficient exposure & experience in the field by providing enough corpus funds.

It is normally thought that a company would not be considering anything other than profit and consumers while designing a product. But it seems that line of thought is not entirely true. Mr. Baxi shed light on how companies have gone to great extents in the past to modify their products or processes so that they are better for the society in general and do not harm the environment.

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Contributed by -
Tanveer Singh,
PGDISEM,
NITIE, Mumbai.

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