CSR In India: From Obligation To Impact - A Decade Of Section 135, Compliance Gaps, And The Road Ahead Under The Companies (Amendment) Bill, 2025
Alok Pratap Singh & Shivam Singh, Law Centre-II, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi
ABSTRACT
Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, became a legal duty for large Indian companies in April 2014, when Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013 came into force. The idea was simple: companies above a certain size must spend at least two percent of their average profit on social causes such as education, health and rural development, and must report what they spent. This paper looks back at ten years of this law. It studies what the compliance data actually shows, and argues that the law has been very good at making companies spend money and file paperwork, but much weaker at making sure that money actually changes people's lives for the better. This gap between spending money (an output) and improving lives (an outcome) is the central problem this paper examines. The paper also studies the Companies (Amendment) Bill, 2025, which proposes to widen the CSR net to cover more companies and to require more expertise on CSR Committees, and asks whether this Bill closes the gap or only makes the compliance machinery bigger. Drawing lessons from the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union, the paper argues that India's CSR law needs to shift its attention from counting rupees spent to measuring real change delivered, and it ends with specific, practical suggestions for how the law can get there.
Keywords: CSR; Section 135; Companies Act 2013; Companies (Amendment) Bill 2025; Compliance versus Impact.
