How can corporate India contribute to the riple bottom line?
Today, the whole world is trying to address the critical issue of sustainability. The corporate sector has a special responsibility to contribute to this larger mission while achieving its business objectives. The Indian corporate sector, while generating economic surplus, needs to sharpen its focus on replenishing natural capital and on eliminating poverty through the creation of sustainable employment opportunities. Isn’t there an inherent conflict between the objectives of creating value for the shareholder and contributing to environmental and social capital? Generally corporate social and environmental initiatives tend to be philanthropic and hence limited in scale. But ITC’s creative endeavour has demonstrated that there is no inherent contradiction between the objectives of creating shareholder value and enhancing social and environmental capital. The creativity of the ITC model lies in ensuring that these two objectives mutually dovetail into and reinforce each other. The more
