In a letter to minister Jayanthi Natarajan, he asked her to “personally intervene" to “allay the misapprehension of the entrepreneurs on environment policy".
The immediate trigger is the environment ministry's latest policy of asking corporates to mandatorily commit five per cent of project investments in environment protection measures, under what it calls corporate environment responsibility (CER).
“Even a corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda is administered voluntarily and is not to be mandated by the government," Sharma noted in the August 2 letter.
Currently, CSR practices are dictated by voluntary guidelines notified by the ministry of corporate affairs in December 2009.
They ask business entities to formulate their own CSR policy, with specific amounts allocated in their budgets for CSR activities, approved by the company's board. Read the full report here.
Source: Sudheer Pal Singh, Business Standard, New Delhi.
