Social Initiatives at Thermax Ltd.

The introduction of the new Companies Bill, 2013, in India, brought in several reforms in the Indian corporate sector. The law mandated firms to spend 2% of their average net profits on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities (Refer to Exhibit I) . According to industry observers, this had twofold implications: increase in spending on development projects, and more transparency and accountability on the part of firms. Only a few firms in the Indian scenario met the 2% criterion, while a handful of them had a structured CSR program . Indian firms had moved away from ‘chequebook philanthropy’ to spending more (and in different ways) on stakeholders or rural and semi-urban populations that were affected by factories in their vicinity.