India, Oct 22: Salaried employees in India earning more than ₹5 lakh a year represent an estimated ₹1,850 crore annual opportunity in employee giving and volunteering, yet only 22% of companies surveyed offer donation matching, compared to 93% globally, reveals the third edition of dus spoke India Inc 2026: Trends, Insights, & Voices, released today by Give Grants. Drawing on Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings of more than 29,500 companies, surveys of 67 CSR leaders and 200 non-profit leaders, and publicly available leadership data for 100 of India’s top CSR-spending companies, the study finds that CSR can, and must, do a lot more.
12 years into India’s CSR mandate, the report notes that high compliance overheads and restrictive policies are inevitable byproducts of a legal mandate, but still leave enough room for CSR to invest in innovative, early-stage bets. It also finds that CSR capital is highly concentrated, with 200 companies accounting for 49% of total spend. Project sizes vary sharply: the top 200 companies run about 12,500 projects averaging ₹1.6 crore each, the next 300 run about 6,600 projects averaging ₹61 lakh, and the next 29,046 companies run more than 69,600 projects averaging just ₹18 lakh each. Within companies, employee engagement remains an opportunity waiting to be leveraged: giving participation, the report observes, stays low unless the program is strongly marketed internally and built into the HR calendar, from employee inductions and festivals to celebrations and other employee moments.
Commenting on the findings and the strategic shift required across corporate boardrooms, Sumit Tayal, CEO, Give, said:
“Over the past decade, mandatory CSR has successfully built the compliance foundations, and is now well placed to take a shot at complex systemic challenges. It cannot do it alone. However, by working smartly with the government across levels, and by engaging its employees to do good, it can punch well above its weight. The next decade belongs to leaders who look beyond just grants: leaders who mobilize their workforce, take ambitious risks, and deploy high-conviction capital to solve challenges that mainstream public budgets miss, or cannot solve, or need help with.”
The report’s data on employee giving and project size bears this out. 49% of CSR leaders surveyed say their organization runs a structured giving program, and 48% of those programs see less than 5% employee participation. The report estimates the opportunity at roughly ₹1,000 crore in volunteering value and ₹850 crore in payroll giving potential each year.
Emphasizing the necessity for corporate portfolios to embrace catalytic risk-taking rather than simply funding routine projects, Amit Chandra, Chairperson, Bain Capital India, and Co-Founder, A.T.E. Chandra Foundation, noted in the report:
“CSR today accounts for barely 1% of India’s social sector spending. If we use it simply to fund more projects, it will remain just that: 1%. However, its real power lies in being catalytic. CSR can do three things differently: take risks, build institutions, and generate evidence. In doing so, it can back innovative social ideas that governments and markets can later scale… Just as companies invest in research and innovation to fuel growth and remain competitive, every large CSR portfolio should allocate a portion of its capital to catalytic bets that address root causes and/or create systemic impact.”
CSR also follows corporate footprint, the study finds: Tata Steel accounts for 41% of Jharkhand’s CSR, Reliance accounts for 21% of Gujarat’s CSR, 5 mining and metals companies together account for 53% of Odisha’s CSR, and ONGC, REC, NTPC and GAIL together account for 30% of Delhi’s CSR, even though their main operating assets are in other states. The response to SEBI’s Social Stock Exchange shows a similar gap: non-profits are waiting and watching the SSE with significant interest, while CSR’s reaction is more tepid. Half of the non-profits surveyed are already registered on the SSE (16%) or considering it (35%), but only 3% of CSR respondents are likely to use it this year, and 60% are unlikely to use it.
At the same time, the report finds that CSR is becoming a specialized corporate function, with dedicated roles and teams with domain-specific training. Among the top 100 companies analyzed, 44% have a dedicated CSR head, while 56% have CSR heads who also have additional responsibilities. Dedicated CSR heads more often hold a development-sector degree: 55%, compared to 25% among heads with additional responsibilities. Among CSR teams surveyed, 85% cite capability built within the team as a source of expertise and 78% cite NPO partners’ expertise, well ahead of CSR consultants at 33%.
However, the study finds that CSR teams and non-profits do not agree on who is accountable for outcomes. While 82% of CSR teams believe projects are co-created with shared accountability, only 40% of non-profit partners agree, and 50% of non-profits see themselves as solely accountable for implementation and outcomes, with CSR playing a supporting role at best.
