World peace, independence, nation building, religion, giving back to the society and conscience, cleaning triggers essentially drove the demand of the 50s. But it was in the Stockholm Conference in 1972 that the issues of environmental degradation in industrialised countries and poverty in the developing countries set the alarm bells ringing. A variety of tools and techniques were used to understand the social dimensions associated with the problems that prevailed at the time.

In India, there was a tremendous increase in public awareness regarding corporate social responsibility. By the 1990s, the NGO movements grew stronger and the country saw a lot of judicial activism, making the government tighten the existing regulations. As this movement picked up, the perspective of the people changed from welfare to a rights-based approach. At the same time, the global focus shifted to poverty and great emphasis was laid on integration of sustainability dimensions of various interventions. There were new concepts like the triple bottom line approach, involving multi-stakeholders.

The Bhopal gas tragedy can be seen as a turning point that awakened the fraternity round the globe which invariably brought about civil society outbursts (the role of the civil society was limited to trade unions and the welfare of the staff and their family), leading to further strengthening of the government regulations. The NGOs aggressively started questioning the policies of corporates and their stance towards the communities living in close vicinity.

The multi-stakeholder initiative became pronounced after the Rio Conference in 1992. With the emergence of a carbon market and the hardening of the WTO negotiations, the global focus shifted on to the politics of trade. In order to help the Indian corporate imperative survive and sustain, there emerged a need to operate as a responsible business.

For the manager with a long-term view, the triple bottom lines, which express the performance of a business not only in financial terms but also in environmental and social ones, inevitably merge into one: a company can only continue to be profitable as long as it satisfies its many stakeholders – investors, customers, employees and neighbours.

Alienating any one of these groups can, in the course of time, only be a recipe for corporate disaster. Just as a company must make profits to survive and grow, it must increasingly nurture its positive impact on social values and nature’s resources. So, all the three bottom lines can be rolled into one – the financial – simply by introducing an adequate time horizon. Good corporate citizenship pays good dividends.

There will always be, no doubt, businesses that will want to go for short-term gains. But given the general trend of public opinion and policy making, it is going to become quite difficult in the years to come for corporations to avoid complying with the laws of the land or lands in which they operate without at some point jeopardising their own future. Some of the biggest companies in the world have disappeared off the business map, demonstrating that a cavalier attitude, such as that of Enron towards financial accountability, or of Union Carbide towards environmental responsibility can result in early corporate death. Hit-and-run profits are obviously not what the management gurus are talking about. The social responsibility of a corporation is, then, to make profits but in a sustainable manner.