A recent cycle tour sponsored by Adani ostensibly for health under the cover of Corporate Social Responsibility, a citizens’ protest against their double standards, and police protection, makes us all ponder about what this Corporate Social Responsibility is all about. Indeed, cycling is good for health, but carrying out such a CSR exercise is akin to planting a handful saplings while axing thousands of trees.
It was in fact reminiscent of Vedanta’s Sterlite company’s CSR strategy, which it boasts as ‘a bus with team of professional doctors travels through the villages of Thoothukudi to provide free primary and secondary health care access benefitting 50,000 population covering 28 villages’, and received the ‘BT-CSR excellence award’ in 2017. So much for CSR, even as doctors christened the skin patches in patients in the area where the factory is located, as ‘Sterlite patches’, and citizens met brutal State repression when they opposed the expansion plans of this company and the operation of its polluting copper plant in Thoothukudi, resulting in death of 15 protestors.
“We don’t need your schools, hospitals or water. Just get out of here,” is the refrain that echoes across the villages that surround the Sterlite copper plant, records the 2018 Annual Report of Corporate Watch in India. “The recent years have seen a spate of dilutions in environmental laws and dismantling of age-old institutions and safeguards in order to allow for urbanisation, industrialisation and unfettered development to the detriment of the people and the environment.
Soon after coming into power, the current government fulfilled its commitment to industrialists, who had supported its campaign, by approving at least 230 projects – environmental clearances of which were held up by the previous government – and lifting the moratorium on new industries in critically polluted clusters of the country,” the Report adds.
So, is corporate social responsibility a cover up for corporate irresponsibility? How else does one explain the total disregard by corporates such as Adani, JSW and Vedanta for the consequences of the coal handled at Mormugao Harbour, for the lives of citizens of Goa? The image of the toddler’s blackened feet due to coal dust is too recent to forget. The dark soot covered house surfaces and stored water are a past and present continuous experience. The trail of health hazards and environmental damage caused by coal dust have been well documented, even as Jindal and Adani are looking to expand their existing berths at the port. The coal dust blackens lungs, increases incidents of respiratory disorder, it’s threatening fragile forests, paddy fields, countless streams and rivers, at one place even a tiger corridor, at least two sanctuaries, and an entire hill, as an Indian Express report.
Or is corporate social responsibility about ensuring the entrenchment of corporate greed within Goa, as the fishing community at Kharevaddo is rightly asking? Why doesn’t the Government tax the corporates adequately and then spend towards its welfare obligations? If the government used taxes for welfare, may be then we would not need corporates to fund cycling events for the collective health of the people. Goans are all too familiar with the insidious attempts over the years in Goa by corporates to gain social acceptability and legitimacy by sponsoring what the middle class would love and which can in fact numb them into forgetting all the ills of the day. Right from the days when starred hotels sponsored football tournaments in the villages. It was even reported that “the Goa football league was taken over and its name was changed, when Thapar- DuPont offered a sponsorship of a few lakh of rupees”. Only in those days, that is, in the 90’s it may not have been formally called ‘corporate social responsibility’. Or is corporate social responsibility about tax injustice, where a small amount is spent, while wool is pulled over one’s eyes for the larger chunks that are evaded to be duly paid to the State exchequer?
There are other ways in which revenue-earning from the Adani Group enterprises’ operations in India, has been short-circuited – and understandably so. If one remembers, even before his election in 2014, Modi has been the beneficiary of largesse from the Adani Group. For his pre-election campaign, Modi is reported to have used their aircraft while travelling to campaign for the 2014 General Election. The Caravan in fact reported that “from publicly available evidence, it is clear that the Adani Group has, at great cost to the public exchequer, received massive advantages from Gautam Adani’s relationship with Modi — first through Modi’s tenure as the chief minister of Gujarat, and now his tenure as the Prime minister of India.”
One sees various avatars of corporate social responsibility. Corporate Social Responsibility seems to have been reduced to a weapon to promote a brand image that will whitewash the sins of commission and omission of the corporate. It looks like CSR is sought to be used to distract from socially irresponsible practices in the corporate’s core operations. It seems to be a way to create social acceptability even as the State lowers the standards of what is legally required of a corporate or of particular corporates such as Adani.
Should we not then insist on Corporate Legal Responsibility instead of this wishy-washy Corporate Social Responsibility – a corporate accountability where the corporate will not enjoy immunity from the law, impunity to act as it pleases, with no agency or appropriate means of redress to people to call in question their ways of adversely impacting people’s health, livelihoods and their lives itself?
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer, human rights activist and an independent researcher.)
