Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility: A Role for Corporate India in Rural Primary Education

With the bulk of India’s population residing in rural areas, access to quality primary education in non-urban areas is vital to unlock the country’s vast economic potential. Good primary education is likely to provide a solid foundation to the rural poor for acquiring higher education, professional skills and employment, thereby reducing poverty for them and enabling sustained economic growth for the country. Government schools, which comprise the majority of schools in rural India, have been unable to address the challenge due to inferior facilities, ineffective teaching and mismanagement. As a result, rural parents, who can afford to do so, are increasingly enrolling their children in private schools that have been opportunistically set up in relatively affluent rural areas. While such schools demonstrate better results than government schools, they are far from adequate in terms of quality and accessibility. We believe that there is a need to meet the twin challenges of quality and accessibility with more innovative methods which involve more than the traditional providers of education. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming more central to the societal expectations from commercial organizations, with the possibility that spending a certain percentage of corporate income on societal welfare is likely to have legislative sanction. However, with a few exceptions, CSR in India seems to lack focus and ownership towards socio-economic development initiatives such as rural education. We argue that more corporations should focus their CSR initiatives towards addressing the challenges of primary education in rural India. There is a critical need for good educational institutions, which have thus far confined themselves to urban areas, to establish primary schools in rural areas. However, several other challenges need to be addressed in order to facilitate the entry of such institutions into rural areas as well as to enable students to enrol and continue in schools. We believe that a consortium of educational institutions, non-government organizations (NGOs), and other affiliated organizations lead by the CSR wing of a prominent private sector organization working in partnership with government institutions may be able to address these requirements. We argue that a collaborative partnership that has commonality of purpose, well-defined accountabilities and outcome-based performance measures has the potential to yield an order of magnitude improvement in rural primary education.