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Corporate social responsibility in community development and sustainability: Rourkela Steel Plant, a unit of SAIL, India

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Abstract

An attempt is made in this article to explore and build knowledge on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performances for community development and sustainability in the context of Rourkela Steel Plant of Steel Authority of India in Odisha, particularly in the wake of Companies Act, section 135, 2013. The paper looks at the conduct of CSR transitional strategy if any for delivering a range of activities while the amount of money spent on CSR is a common indicator of performance. The case is based on content analysis and narrative inquiry. In-depth, open-ended personal interview and focus group discussion were conducted with project participants, women leaders, youth, community stakeholders, NGO partners and officials. Hard data and field information on the impact of CSR initiatives were organised to validate the proposition. Findings indicate that brand building and creating far-reaching positive business impact of RSP-SAIL as a responsible corporate citizen were important outcomes. This paper sets up an analytical framework that defines transitional strategies at different levels of communities in terms of production, organisations, governance, institutions and culture of relationships, noting how best to guide corporate towards sustainable community development through its CSR policy.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the CSR team of RSP-SAIL to share their view points. We are extremely grateful for the helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team of Asian Journal of Business Ethics. My special thanks to my PhD supervisor Dr. Ragnhild Lund, NTNU, Norway who has acquainted me in this area with the paper HS 44 on Rural Community Organization and Development in MSc. in the year 1994 at AIT Bangkok.

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Correspondence to Jyotirmayee Acharya.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. The secondary source of information was obtained from the annual report, the SAIL, India of the years 2012–2013/2014.

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Acharya, J., Patnaik, S.N. Corporate social responsibility in community development and sustainability: Rourkela Steel Plant, a unit of SAIL, India. Asian J Bus Ethics 7, 53–79 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13520-017-0079-5

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