LINKING CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR)PRACTICES TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGs) IN INDIA

India is a vast country with huge size of population and half of the population is living under poverty & inequality. Indias big share of population is struggling for basic amenities and there is a need of collaborative efforts of both government and corporate sector. In India Sustainable Development Goals (here after SDGs) and Corporate social Responsibility (hereafter CSR) are the most powerful tools to deal with social issues. CSR seems like a powerful framework for corporate sector to engage in achieving SDGs to a certain extent. In 2015 India adopted the 17 sustainable development goals with 169 targets and in 2014 CSR policy came with social initiatives. The idea behind linking CSR & SDGs is the thematic social sectors included in both of them.The activities which are included in schedule VII of companies act having lot of overlap with the thematic areas of sustainable development goals and thats why there has seen tremendous potential of both tools to develop a model for sustainable growth. Till date from 2014 to 2020 corporate sector contributed Rs. 59,505 cr. in CSR activities which are directly related to SDGs. So, this paper focus on the concept of leveraging CSR practices because working on CSR practices will ultimately help in achieving SDGs to higher extent.

India is a vast country with huge size of population and half of the population is living under poverty & inequality. India"s big share of population is struggling for basic amenities and there is a need of collaborative efforts of both government and corporate sector. In India Sustainable Development Goals (here after SDG"s) and Corporate social Responsibility (hereafter CSR) are the most powerful tools to deal with social issues. CSR seems like a powerful framework for corporate sector to engage in achieving SDGs to a certain extent. In 2015 India adopted the 17 sustainable development goals with 169 targets and in 2014 CSR policy came with social initiatives. The idea behind linking CSR & SDG"s is the thematic social sectors included in both of them.The activities which are included in schedule VII of companies act having lot of overlap with the thematic areas of sustainable development goals and that"s why there has seen tremendous potential of both tools to develop a model for sustainable growth. Till date from 2014 to 2020 corporate sector contributed Rs. 59,505 cr. in CSR activities which are directly related to SDGs. So, this paper focus on the concept of leveraging CSR practices because working on CSR practices will ultimately help in achieving SDGs to higher extent.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….... Introduction:-
Sustainability is a word which has evoked the concern of government and social responsibility is a word which evoked the concern of corporate world. Both has expanded their perspective and scope for eradicating social issues. The sustainability reports of India show the concern about addressing social issues and if we look over CSR, there has seen collective responsibility of both. Since few years several companies have started mapping their CSR resources towards sustainability. This clearly shows the willingness and potential of corporates to attain sustainable development goals. Corporate Social Responsibility is said to be a derivative of sustainable development which address the behaviour of corporate sector toward community. The impact of sustainable development depends upon the idea of using resources towards the continued progress. One of the most important things for sustainable development is to put people first. The concept of CSR somewhere contributes a lot towards sustainable development and the activities mentioned in CSR are as similar as sustainable development goals. Additionally, CSR also focus on three major dimensions which are social,economic and environmental development. The pillars of sustainable development are the focusing areas for CSR.

Research Methodology:-
This paper is analytical in nature and it is based on secondary data. This study basically looks over the concept of sustainable development goals and Corporate Social Responsibility. How SDGs and CSR are interconnected, why they should be linked, what is the relationship between these two. The purpose for the study is to get a synthesized approach of both Sustainable development Goals and CSR. The relevant data for this paper is collected from the website of NITI Aayog, National CSR portaland from other reliable sources. The data under this paper is processed as per the requirements of the study.

Evolution of CSR and SDGs Corporate Social Responsibility
India has been popular to world"s as richest "Nation of Givers". The framework of CSR was established in 1950s -60s by Bowen but the concept of CSR is not new to India,philanthropy and charity has been prevailing in India since ages. CSR policy was introduced in Companies Act, 2013 and is implemented from 1 April, 2014 for the organisations having Net worth of Rs. 500 Crore or more, or Turnover of Rs. 1000 Crore or more, or Net profit of Rs. 5 Crore or more. If the company fall under any of above-mentioned conditions are required to create a CSR committee and has to contribute 2% of their average net profit made during 3 immediately preceding 3 years on activities listed under schedule VII of Companies Act. The historical legislation of CSR gone through many phases. The phases of CSR are as under.

Sustainable Development Goals
The sustainable development goals were introduced at UN conference on sustainable development in the year of 2012. The main objective of these goals was to make a set of universal goals to meet the needs of environment and to deal with the challenges facing by the world. Basically, the SDGs were the replacement of Millennium development goals. These were started in 2000 to address the problem of poverty. Around 15 years MDGs worked in the domain of reducing poverty,hunger, and health conditions. MDGs made drastic achievement in dealing with HIV, AIIDS and other diseases like malaria and tuberculosis then these MDGs are replaced and new Sustainable Development Goals introduced. The urgent call of sustainable development goals shifted the world on integrated sustainable path. SDGs are the collection of 17 global goals designed to gain better sustainable future plans.
In India these goals were adopted in September 2015 as "Transforming Our World": 2020 agenda of sustainable development. India has been committed to 17 SDGs with 169 targets. NITI Aayog is assigned to look over the implementation,progress, achievement of SDGs in the country.  From 2014 to 2020 companies contributed Rs. 59,505 cr. for CSR. The data of Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs shows that CSR expenditure has increased tremendously. In past five to six years CSR spending increased from Rs. 6552 cr. in 2014 to Rs. 13405 Cr. in 2020. During these years, number of companies from public and private sector contributed major chunk for CSR. These corporates diverted a major chunk of CSR towards human development which is the ultimate aim of SDGs. In India, top companies which are doing good CSR are, Reliance Industries Limited, Tata consultancy services Limited, Oil and Natural gas corporation limited, HDFC bank limited, Indian oil corporation limited, Infosys Limited, Bharat Petroleum corporation limited and ITC limited.

Contribution of CSR towards Sustainable Development Goal4: Education
The mandate CSR in companies act 2013 has opened the doors for corporate to create positive impact on society and to make good relation with the stakeholders.The total CSR spending of last five years is more than 52,533 Crore out of which education sector attracted more than Rs. 15,742 Cr.In CSR education sector is one of the most beneficiary things which will result in improved funding for the educational institutions. Apart from the various developmental sectors of India, there is still a darkest phase prevailing in India where more than 8 Crore children"s are being forced to work instead of going to school/college or even after being educated 11.4% students are unemployed. The dropout rate or the reason behind such conditions is lack of quality education and skill development education in India. In last five years education sector received huge amount of funding from government as education budget and from corporates through CSR. The role of government and organisations in education ecosystem is too crucial and complex but looking towards the funding and initiative trend, the collaborative or joint hands of public policy and CSR policy is ray of hope for fulfilling the aim of Sustainable development goal 4 that is education. Society is neglected for their own welfare activities. Corporates are performing various welfare practices but they do not establish a proper communication structure with the society which lack the impact of CSR on SDGs. 2. Transparency:Transparency is a controversial issue in CSR. There exist a kind of hesitation on various parts of corporates to speak up about their disclosure, which leads to hamper the trust building that is actually the success key of social initiatives. 3. Measurement of Progress:Corporate sector is involved in numerous good CSR practices, but there is no structured parameter or index which measure their performance in uniform way at national or global level. They work in the direction of supporting SDGs but there is no uniform measurement of that work. 4. Implementation:There is need for uniform deployment of CSR practices. There has seen lack of cohesiveness among the implementing partners. Other than this there is no such strong monitoring body which keeps eye on the performance of corporates social responsibility. So, it is big challenge in the alignment of CSR to SDGs.
In India, the outline priority for SDGs has already featured in schedule VII of Companies Act, 2013 (in CSR policy). It would be better if government and corporate sector align their efforts together for visible impact on society. If the challenges of both CSR and SDGs implementation will handled properly it automatically leads to address the problems of sustainable development.

Conclusion:-
In the face of several global challenges of societal expectation and movements, corporate sector has to redefine their role in the society. Corporate world is indispensable component of society and it is the need of an hour that companies must link their social responsibility practices with sustainable development goals. As per the facts and figures, in past five to six years CSR spending increased from Rs. 6552 cr. in 2014 to Rs. 13405 Cr. in 2020. The amount which is invested in CSR activities is related to hunger, poverty, malnutrition, education, women empowerment, climate change, clean drinking water and so on, and all these activities are directly related to SDGs. So, this collaboration of CSR and SDGs is viewing as social innovation. CSR will certainly provide a visible impact in sustainability and it will become a landscape in attaining the SDGs. It is very much clear that there are numerous ways of aligning corporate social responsibility to national SDGs. There are already several good practices of corporates which shows how companies are contributing in the domain of hunger, poverty, education, women empowerment, climate change economicgrowth, reducing inequality and environmental balance to reach at SDGs to certain extent. So, in order to capture the impact of CSR towards SDGs there is need for corporate performance measurement and evaluation system.