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An Indian
beggar waits for donations in Agartala on August 9, 2013
(AFP/File, Arindam
Dey)
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NEW DELHI —
India's government still struggles to provide reliable basic services to a
majority of its citizens, trapping hundreds of millions of them in poverty. Now
the country's richest firms have been told they must help.
Under the
new amended Companies Act passed last month by parliament, large businesses
have been asked to spend 2.0 percent of their profits each year on
"Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR).
"The
idea is that if we could divert some corporate energy and the corporate way of
doing business into our development sector, for a country like India it could
help enormously," the head of the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs
(IICA), Bhaskar Chatterjee, explained to AFP.
CSR is
broadly -- some say vaguely -- defined in the law to mean funding programmes
for education, poverty alleviation, protecting the environment or tackling
disease, among others.
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An Indian
mother sits with her children
outside their slum home strewn with
garbage in
Mumbai on June 4, 2013
(AFP/File, Indranil Mukherjee)
|
It's one of
the first such laws of its kind in the world, promising a cash bonanza for
charities and non-government organisations (NGOs) while raising serious
concerns the funds could worsen India's endemic corruption.
CSR has
been imposed across much of corporate India. Any business with sales of more
than 10 billion rupees ($156 million), a net worth of 5.0 billion rupees, or
bottom-line profits of 50 million rupees is liable.
They must
set up a board to implement and report on the company's CSR policy, in theory
ensuring that an average of 2.0 percent of the net profits of the previous
three years is spent annually.
Failure to
report on this spending, as with other financial disclosure requirements, will
result in fines and possibly imprisonment for a company's directors.
IICA, a
business group established by the ministry of corporate affairs, calculates that
7,000 companies qualify, creating a possible annual pool of funds estimated at
120-150 billion rupees ($1.9-2.4 billion).
Sidharth
Birla, president-elect of business group FICCI, says that corporate India
lobbied hard against previous drafts of the law that would have forced
companies to spend their profits.
"If
they had made it mandatory then what would have stopped any other authority
from imposing a burden on the company?" he told AFP, reprising one of the
arguments against mandatory spending.
The final
law says companies should set aside 2.0 percent of profits for CSR and must
report on their activities, but it also gives them an easy get-out -- there are
no sanctions for failing to spend the money.
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File photo
shows Indian homeless eating
food at a feeding programme for the poor
in
Hyderabad (AFP/File, Noah Seelam)
|
"We
have been given to understand that you could well report that 'I have seen
everything and I can't spend it'," Birla said.
The success
of the CSR revolution will therefore depend on how companies approach the new
rules, says Samir Saran from the New Delhi-based think-tank Observer Research
Foundation.
The money
could become a sort of "slush fund" channelled into charities and
NGOs run by politicians -- "a legal way of bribing," says Saran -- or
into foundations run as pet projects by the family members of business owners.
"We
have to be sure that this is not another policy with good intentions and
horrible consequences," he told AFP. "It is how it is implemented
that will decide its success."
One early
alarm bell was the government in the central state of Chhattisgarh asking
companies to deposit their CSR funds with the chief minister's Community
Development Fund earlier this week.
Saran
favours mandatory CSR overall as a way of forcing good corporate behaviour. The
Indian private sector "is notorious for not having participated in the
social agenda," he says.
Though
broadly true, not all can be tarred. The sprawling Tata conglomerate, owner of
Jaguar LandRover and India's biggest software company, is a global leader in
corporate giving and is controlled by a charitable trust.
The founder
of software group Wipro, Azim Premji, has followed the example of US
billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett by handing large parts of his
fortune to his education charity.
But for the
majority of companies with little or no experience in CSR, they will depend on
external charities, foundations and NGOs amid questions about their capacity to
absorb the cash.
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File photo
of Indian homeless asleep in the
shade of a bank advertisement in New Delhi
(AFP/File, Raveendran)
|
India's
charity sector is rich in organisations -- 1.2 million, according to the
Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) -- and low in regulation.
In November
2011, the national audit authority published a damning report showing that only
3.5 percent of the NGOs which received grants from the environment ministry
completed their projects.
Peter ter
Weeme, co-founder of international sustainability consultancy Junxion, which
has an office in New Delhi, stresses that capacity as well as corruption is a
huge problem.
"I've
seen in North America where large corporations wrote one-million-dollar cheques
to NGOs," he told AFP. "The NGOs couldn't handle that sort of
money."
State-run
companies have been subject to mandatory CSR for years but they are sitting on
cash piles with "no idea how to spend it," he said.
He
commended India becoming "probably the first country to have the most
broad far-reaching legislation on the subject" -- Nigeria and Malaysia are
considering something similar -- but there are obvious flaws.
"One
of the biggest issues it doesn't address is corruption. If anything it might
even exacerbate it," he concluded.
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“… Tesla the Man
There was a point in time when humanity almost stumbled, by the way. You were having a hard time with electricity. So a man came along who was way ahead of his time and was available and his name was Nikola Tesla. He gave you a principle that today you call alternating current. Dear ones, I challenge you to understand this principle. Most of you can't, because it is not in 3D. The attributes are still considered "genius-level thinking" to this day. The whole idea of the kind of electricity you use today comes from this man's quantum mind.
That was all he was allowed to do. Tesla himself was a kind of time capsule, delivered at the right time. He had more, but alternating current was all that was allowed to be given to the planet at that time. Oh, he tried to give you more. He knew there were other things, but nothing was able to be developed. If I told you what else he had discovered, you might not be aware of it at all, since it was never allowed to get out of the box. Earth was not ready for it.
Tesla discovered massless objects. He could alter the mass of atomic structure using designer magnetics, but he never could control it. He had objects fly off his workbench and hit the ceiling, but he couldn't duplicate or control it. It just wasn't time yet. Do you know what else he was known for? It was seemingly the failure of the transmission of electricity. However, he didn't fail at all.
There are pictures of his tower, but every time a Human Being sees a tower, there is a biased assumption that something is going to be broadcast through the air. But in the case of Tesla, he had figured out how to broadcast electricity through the ground. You need towers for that because they have to pick up the magnetics within the ground in a certain way to broadcast them and then collect them again from the nodes of the planet's magnetic grid system. We talked about this before. He was utilizing the grid of the planet that is in the earth itself! He was on the edge of showing that you could use the whole grid of the planet magnetically to broadcast electricity and pick it up where you need it, safely, with no wires. But the earth was not ready for it.
Tesla died a broken man, filled with ideas that would have brought peace to planet Earth, but he was simply not allowed to give any of them to you.
Now I'll tell you why he was stopped, dear ones, and it's the first time we have ever told you – because these inventions were too easy to weaponize. Humanity just isn't ready for it. You're not ready for massless objects, either, for the principles are too easy to weaponize.
"So," you might say, "when will we be ready for it?" I think you already know the answer, don't you? At the time when Human consciousness reaches a point where that which is most important is unification and not separation, it will happen. A point where conquering and power are not desirable ideas or assets. A point where humanity will measure the strength of its population by how healthy they are and not by economic growth. A point where coming together with your neighbor is the main objective to social consciousness, and not conquering them or eliminating them. That's coming, dear ones. It's a ways away, but it's coming. Look around the planet at the moment. The old energy leaders are obvious, are they not? It's like they are relics in a world of thinking that is passing them by. ….”
