Demystifying CSR and Corporate Sustainability, and Its Impact on the Bottom of the Pyramid

Academic literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) suggests that organisations undertake CSR or sustainability activities with larger objectives in mind that generate several economic, social, and other returns. Some of these objectives include increasing their triple bottom-line performance, gaining social legitimacy in society, developing healthy stakeholder relationships, improved customer loyalty, and superior financial performance. However, organisations have always being haunted by the question, ‘Social performance is good for society, but does it pay?’ Quite often, the beneficiaries of the CSR and sustainability activities of organisations are poor communities, also known as the base of the pyramid (BOP) of society. Since BOP markets are largely informal and exist under the shadow of formal markets governed by public policies, using CSR as a tool to impact the ugly underbelly of our country is quite common. Academic research suggests that CSR has been widely leveraged as a poverty alleviation tool by organisations while also achieving business objectives keeping in mind the firms’ ethical values, while serving multiple stakeholders to meet their economic, legal, and philanthropic goals. Finally, organisations do look for a good corporate citizen image that helps them keep the momentum of ‘business as usual.’ However, it would be interesting to see empirical evidence of how things are shaping up in the Indian corporate landscape. In this study, we interview CSR and sustainability heads of ten large Indian organisations to understand how CSR and sustainability activities impact the bottom of the Indian pyramid.