Corporate Social Responsibility- Its future

Dr. Justice. V.R Krishna Iyer
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By V.R Krishna Iyer

Corporate Social Responsibility is a modern idea which has become very familiar in the world of today.  The primitive economy of previous times dependent largely on private ownership by individuals and families and rarely by royalties, dynasties, castes, classes and minorities.  When a group of persons own the resources of a community it takes the shape of a company.  A number of specified persons have exclusive ownership of the resources of a community.  There is a tendency to exploit and make a profit which is shared only by limited number.  This limited number of group shares the profit so made and their privileges belonged to the shareholders only.  These shareholders form a company who became a class of haves.  The majority for the masses excluded from the profit-making club become the have-nots.  This society divided into haves and have-nots.  Sometimes the haves become two large a number and regulations are no certainty to organize the rules that govern the owning classes.  A corporation is formed when the number is large.  The modern world which owns the reservoirs of the community consists of corporations.  Indeed, when the wealth of a nation is owned and controlled by a number or class becomes the pattern of proprietorship.  The developing world ownership takes the shape of the proletariat and the have-nots who are the masses and have no share in the ownership of the nation’s resources they became the preliterate.  In short, takes the shape of private economics called capitalism.  The world we live in is largely capitalist and democratic in a competitive world where nation’s fight for control or resources war becomes a means of securing power.  Wars result in imperialism.  Britain became an imperialist power and occupy Asian nations which were weaker and suffered in the lose of the independence and the resources to be reduced to the status of colonies.  These colonies resisted their humiliation and battled for independence.  World War-I and World War-II were the product of competitive wars when frustrated nations with dissolution people rose in revolt to cease State power.  They established a new equality abolishing class ownership and establishing socialist proprietorship whereby the producing classes accepted their accountability to society as a whole.  This is socialism as a broad sense.  This socialist State has a responsibility for the wealth of the State to be made available for the welfare of the people as a whole.  Even in Capitalist State a demand for accountability of the producing corporations to the general public as a welfare obligation became a democratic dimension of governance.  Thus, we have in many parts of the world corporate ownership with marginal accountability for the welfare of the people.  This mixed economy is what we find becoming more popular as Corporate Social Responsibility which is a via media between a raw capitalist State and a Socialist Republic.  The examples are like the United Kingdom and the UK and the USSR.  India constitutionally is a socialist Republic but essentially it is feudal and capitalist with socialist and capitalist forces struggling for a Leftist change.  Taking a broad vision of the politics and geography of the Earth we are still globally capitalist as the rule of life and in a lesser sense there is a Socialist sixth of the world which is the Soviet Union.  In China and other Leftist countries turn crimson.  More acceptability for a Leftist accountability becomes rule of life.  Thus corporate ownership dwindles by degrees and the tendency towards a socialist economy is gaining strength at least on paper.  Even the third world tomorrow looks scarlet.  Human right which in its essence concedes every person entitled to a share of the fundamental rights has a reddish base.  Today human right is gaining, strength and in this sense the world is accepting the rights of the masses in a faction of the wealth of the world.  The United Nations is a world body whose basic structure is socialist at root.  In short, corporate capitalism is slowly surrendering, very slowly though towards social responsibility.  To be optimistic one may say that tomorrow makes crimson the shape of the State economy.  Read Russia and yellow China may one day make the White West change its hue.


(Dr. Justice V.R Krishna Iyer, eminent jurist, is a former Judge of Supreme Court of India)