India's largest companies must spend two percent of their profits on CSR. Their filings can tell you where the money went, and for most of the money they do not. They never tell you who received it, what position those people held, or whether it changed their lives. Select a company to walk it up the ladder.
Every figure here comes from public, open data: the CSR disclosures that companies filed themselves with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, 2014–2020. Companies appear as illustrations of a pattern, not as a ranking. A verdict would change with a fuller later filing, with money recorded at state level or as ‘PAN India’ that in fact reached these districts, with an error in matching districts, or with beneficiaries living outside the recorded district. Corrections are welcome and will be rerun.
Data. CSR projects by company, district, sector and year, 2014–2020, from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs via the India Data Portal (the file covers 50 to 92 percent of the national total by year, and only the largest companies). Districts matched to Census 2011 (381 exact, 31 by spelling, 76 by a logged manual table). Aspirational districts: NITI Aayog's list of 112. Tribal-majority: Scheduled Tribe share of at least 50 percent in Census 2011. Reach test: a company's money in aspirational districts against their share of the population in the states where it spends, then tribal-majority districts within those; a fail needs a gap of at least 5 points with a 90 percent interval below zero. The 5-point rule lets companies with no money in aspirational districts pass where those districts are small; Tail-End Standard v0.2 replaces it with a threshold that scales with the population share. Registration, script and deviations: available on request. Currency. One crore is ten million rupees. Dollar amounts convert each year’s spending at the Federal Reserve’s annual average rate for that year (release G.5A, FRED series AEXINUS), from ₹60.9953 per dollar in 2014 to ₹74.1429 in 2020, and are summed after conversion.