The dawn of the 21st century saw the birth of conscious capitalism. Increasing global connectedness, our interdependence as humans and personal empowerment are converging to catalyze a mass shift in the corporate conscience. A palpable manifestation of this growing business conscience is corporate social responsibility (CSR).
On April 1, 2014, India became the first country to legally mandate CSR. The new rules in Section 135 of India’s Companies Act make it mandatory for companies with a defined turnover, net worth and profitability to spend two percent of their average net profit for the past three years on CSR.
The law outlines that CSR activities should be undertaken in a “project” mode. Detailed guidelines regarding eligible activities include- hunger and poverty, education, health, gender equality and women empowerment, skills training, environment, social enterprise projects and promotion of rural and national sports.
Many large corporations are handling CSR through their foundations while midsize companies are setting up internal teams to supervise projects carried out by implementing partners. But here is an astounding fact – Data on CSR spend for financial year 2014-15 shows that more than half of the firms have failed to meet their targets for the period. Regardless, many companies are adopting the tick-box mentality by pursuing the easiest solutions for their required spend – investing in the government’s priorities such as building toilets as part of Modi’s “Clean India Mission” (Swachh Bharat Abhiyan), “adopting” local villages or pumping money into the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund.
In this chaotic ecosystem, there are some who are truly focused on creating maximum social impact by pursuing novel initiatives. We at SLSV have always believed in creating maximum social impact and have always looked at CSR as a tool of ‘value creation’.
In our Business with a Conscience Spotlight Series we present companies that are embracing this concept with gusto and the first in our series- ANSYS. 
ANSYS develops, markets, and supports engineering simulation software used to predict how product designs will operate and how manufacturing processes will behave in real-world environments. Founded in 1970, ANSYS employs over 3,000 employees.
We recently spoke to Dr. Kaustubh Nande, Country Market Head, ANSYS India and he pointed out that “ANSYS has aligned its CSR agenda with a broad mission of education within the engineering sector, an area that is part of the governments’ CSR charter. Therefore, it is only logical that we are already engaged with conducting workshops on engineering critical thinking skills at the undergraduate level across tier II and tier III cities. We are also closely working with NASSCOM Skills Council, and partnering with incubators at IIT Madras and IIT Bombay, to mention a few key projects.”
Innovation is one of the core values of ANSYS and this permeates into their approach to adopt the CSR mandate as well.
For this series, we will particularly highlight the work ANSYS is doing with the IIT incubators.
The start-up ecosystem has been a significant contributor to India’s economic growth. India houses one of the largest start-up ecosystem in the world; the funding to this ecosystem, across the country, crossed 5 billion USD in 2015.
This burgeoning growth has catalyzed the growth of incubators. The lack of incubation facilities has been identified as a key gap in the start-up ecosystem, which help in providing mentorship support apart from access to networks and markets. It is no wonder that the government is now asking companies to fund incubators as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility spend.
As mentioned previously, ANSYS works with technology start-up incubators. IIT Chennai’s incubator is one such undertaking. IIT Chennai’s incubator supports technology and social enterprise start-ups. An example of social start-up is Ather, which makes innovative electric scooters and another company InnoNano that makes water filters using nano-particles to eliminate toxicity from drinking water. For more information on how ANSYS is making a difference, click here.
It makes immense business sense to implement CSR and sustainability from the onset. Sustainability offers many benefits beyond positive social impact such as cost reduction, new market opportunities and increased employee engagement. Yet for many start-up companies, sustainability can seem overwhelming; a lot of hard work that will take up a lot of time and resources.
This is where SLSV steps in and to know how we can help please visit us here Or write to us at business@soundnlight.in or call us at +91 987 342 4441.