How Indian firms spent on CSR in FY22, in charts
₹14,801 crore, similar to ₹14,763 crore in 2020-21. This was despite a 6% rise in the net profit benchmark used to decide how much a company should spend on CSR. However, to their credit, at an aggregate level, companies have already been spending more than they are mandated to since 2019-20, said Pranav Haldea, managing director, PRIME Database Group.
To be sure, this doesn’t mean all companies are doing so. 1. CSR kitty In any given year, the law requires companies that fall within a set of criteria to spend at least 2% of their average net profit of the preceding three years on CSR projects.
This 2% mark for the 1,205 companies that were analyzed added up to ₹13,977 crore in 2021-22. The actual spending of ₹14,801 crore was around 6% more. (The data for a bulk of companies for 2022-23 is not yet available.) The surplus came not only from increased spending, but also from the unspent amounts of previous years that some companies put to use.
Yet, not all companies met their mandates: among companies that didn’t, the unspent amount totalled ₹1,225 crore, compared to ₹913 crore in 2020-21. Overall, firms spent nearly 2.01% of their net profit in 2021-22, against 2.13% in 2020-21. On average, each company spent ₹12.03 crore, down from ₹13.03 crore and ₹12.68 crore in 2019-20 and 2020-21, respectively.
Similar to previous years, education-related sectors and healthcare segments continued to find favour with companies. These sectors received close to 60% of the CSR expenditure in 2021-22. This was accompanied by spending on disaster management, which received an amount of ₹1,556 crore and environmental sustainability, with ₹1,227 crore—these two fields had a 10.5% and 8.3% share, respectively, the data showed.
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