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Read storySince the Companies Act, 2013 introduced Section 135, a large number of Indian companies carry a statutory obligation to spend on corporate social responsibility. Most CSR teams discover quickly that the spending is the easy part. The hard part is finding an implementing partner whose work is real, whose paperwork is clean, and whose reporting will survive an audit.
Who Section 135 applies to
Broadly, a company crossing any one of three thresholds in a financial year — net worth, turnover or net profit above the prescribed limits — must constitute a CSR committee and spend at least two per cent of its average net profit of the three preceding financial years on CSR activities. Schedule VII of the Act lists what qualifies: hunger and nutrition, education, healthcare, gender equality, welfare of differently-abled persons, skill development and more. The framework has been amended several times since 2014, so confirm the current thresholds and the current treatment of unspent amounts with your company secretary rather than with any NGO's blog post — including this one.
What a CSR-eligible NGO must be able to show
Under the CSR Rules, an implementing agency has to be registered with the MCA through Form CSR-1 and hold valid 12A and 80G registrations. Ask any prospective partner for all three in writing — including us. Jivanam Foundation is a Section 8 company (CIN U88900UP2023NPL179625, Licence No. 142599) with 12A, 80G and Niti Aayog Darpan ID UP/2023/0343733; every certificate is downloadable from our documents page, and what each registration actually means is explained in our guide to 80G, 12A and Niti Aayog. For our current CSR-1 status, write to us and we will send it with the rest of the due-diligence pack.
Match the Schedule VII head to a real programme
CSR spending has to map to a Schedule VII activity, and the cleanest partnerships are the ones where that mapping is obvious rather than argued. Our five programmes line up directly: hot meals and monthly ration kits against hunger and nutrition, school kits and classes against education, free health camps against preventive healthcare, our special child care centre against welfare of differently-abled persons, and tailoring batches against skill development and gender equality. All five, with what each one delivers per rupee, are set out on our programmes page.
What good CSR reporting looks like
Your board report has to state what was done, where, and for how much. A partner who cannot produce beneficiary numbers, dated photographs and utilisation certificates will cost your team far more time than the grant saves. We report per activity: patients screened at each camp, kits distributed with sector-wise counts, children on the therapy roll, women who completed a batch. Public write-ups such as our camp diary and our tailoring batch stories are the readable version of exactly the same records.
Employee volunteering is the underrated half
The cheque gets signed once a year. Employee engagement is what makes a partnership survive a change of CSR head. Teams that spend a Saturday serving at a food drive or running a session at the skills centre come back with a very different understanding of where the budget goes — and they ask better questions afterwards. We build corporate volunteering days around the existing schedule; this guide to volunteering in Noida covers the practical side, and the story of our first food drive is what a day on the ground actually feels like.
Start the conversation
A CSR partnership normally begins with a short call, then a due-diligence pack, then a site visit — in that order, and all three should be easy to arrange. If your company is allocating CSR funds in Noida or Greater Noida, get in touch and we will send our registrations, programme budgets and last year's field numbers. You can review the unit economics before any meeting on our current cases page, see who you would be working with, or read how the foundation started — with two degchis and a borrowed table, which is still roughly how we think about overheads.
