Cluster Matters: Corporate Social Responsibility and Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Clusters in India

In this chapter, we investigate corporate social responsibility (CSR) in industrial clusters in the Indian context. We use the definition of CSR as given in the Indian Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ National Voluntary Guidelines (NVGs) for Business Responsibility: ‘the commitment of an enterprise to operating in an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable manner, balancing the interests of diverse stakeholders’. Our choice of India as the focus of our chapter is justified by the fact that the Indian economy has grown tremendously in recent decades. Moreover, not only do Indian enterprises sell their products successfully in international markets, but there is also an increasingly large consumer base within India. Indeed, Indian industrial clusters have contributed to a substantial part of this growth process, and there are several hundred registered clusters within the country. At the same time, several attempts have been made at promoting the adoption of CSR in MSMEs in Indian industrial clusters. In fact, India has proved to be a kind of laboratory for experimenting with different types of cluster-based CSR and is thus an interesting location in relation to the broader aim of this handbook, which focuses on the role of CSR in MSMEs. Hence we contribute to the literature on CSR in industrial clusters and specifically CSR in Indian industrial clusters by investigating the drivers of CSR in India’s industrial clusters.