CORPORATE SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN INDIA

Abstract

The activities of business enterprises are increasing day by day and their activities affect people living around the establishment of the enterprise. They even result in cross boundary human rights concerns. Their sales are large enough to beat the collective GDP of various countries and that the State in most of the cases has lost its valuable power to direct the nature of corporate responsibility. Moreover the functions which were part of the State duty is now exercised and controlled by big multinationals which is evident in the area of energy, water, telecommunication and transport. There have been different initiatives taken up at the international level to control the activities of corporations in the area of human rights. But all of them suffers from a drawback which is nothing but the lack of effectiveness as most of them are voluntary codes and do not necessarily involve any form of sanction to corporations which do not adhere to the internationally framed codes/guidelines. Though there are various studies on the concept of corporate responsibility, most of them are not specifically on the point of CSR in relation to Human Rights and International Business Policy. The 2013 enactment, the Companies Act, though incorporated the concept of CSR, is not free from controversies. The definition of corporate itself is a subject of debate. Though, the concept of CSR is in practice worldwide, the instances of human rights abuses by Barclays, Coca-Cola, Tata, Shell, UCIL, Unocal and Nike show that the implementation of the concept has not been very effective. This research in the area of corporate social responsibility strives to make an in depth study on the international standards and the national ones to understand whether legal enactments make the corporate enterprises promote and respect human rights. The need of the study is to know how corporations could be made accountable for human rights violations and to be made responsible for following human rights standards in their business operations.