From Rural Development to Corporate Sustainability: CSR at Tata Steel, 1950-Present

• In Event: The Politics of Philanthropy in India

Abstract

Tata Steel is India’s largest steel producer, and now a truly global company following a wave of high-profile acquisitions in Europe and Southeast Asia in the mid-2000s. For the past half-century, Tata Steel has developed a reputation for pioneering Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in India. Its celebrated stewardship of the industrial town of Jamshedpur and its surroundings, particularly in relation to adivasi (tribal) populations, nonetheless remains poorly contextualized – often treated as a unique case study of corporate benevolence divorced from historical and institutional change. Based on newly available archival documents and a range of interviews with current and former CSR practitioners at Tata Steel, as well as outside critics of the company, this paper reconstructs the shifting meanings of CSR over time. Beginning in the 1950s, Tata Steel assumed direct responsibility for adivasi welfare, culminating in the establishment of the Tata Steel Rural Development Society (TSRDS) as an integrated branch of the company. This arrangement had a complex lineage: housing provision, for example, drew on the Tatas’ experience in constructing model villages as part of flood relief in Bihar and slum clearance in Bombay. Since liberalization in 1991, cost concerns and the need for a broader agenda led to the conversion of TSRDS into a registered NGO and the growth of new partnerships under the umbrella of ‘corporate sustainability.’ As Tata Steel continues to expand both in eastern India and overseas, the spatial distribution and institutional forms of CSR practice become objects of fierce contestation with an uncertain future.

Author

• Mircea Raianu, Harvard University