Prof. Atul Pathak has co-authored a paper titled 'Uncovering the geographical skew in CSR spending in India and opportunities for impactful allocations.' Mr. Abhishek Gawande, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in the Strategy & Entrepreneurship Area at IIM Nagpur, is his co-author.
The study attempts to highlight the need for improvement in the implementation of CSR in India. At a national level, there is a significant issue of misallocated distribution of CSR funds, mainly in terms of geographical focus, the study points out. The analysis of CSR spending data for the last seven years reveals that a large proportion of CSR funds were spent in states already performing well on various socio-economic indicators. In contrast, underdeveloped and economically disadvantaged states received minimal CSR expenditures. The authors have suggested various policy interventions to address India's geographical imbalance of CSR spending.