About Partners in Change

Partners in Change (PiC), established by ActionAid International (AAI) in 1995, is a not-for-profit organization under the Societies Registration Act 1860 to promote the understanding and practice of corporate responsibility (CR) in India. It was among the first organizations in India dedicated to promoting pro-poor CR through partnerships. In the first decade, PiC received funding support from ActionAid International (AAI) India and Ford Foundation. But in order to better focus its resources in a dedicated manner, Partners in Change was established as a separate not-for-profit organization in January 1995. PiC’s mission is to increase the understanding and active participation of business in equitable social development as an integral part of good business practice by promoting partnerships between business, disadvantaged communities, development initiatives and government. PiC has its headquarters in Delhi and also has offices in Bangalore, Jamshedpur, Haryana, Mumbai and field offices in Tirupur and Coonoor. PiC has pioneered surveys amongst leading companies in India to assess their involvement and attitudes towards social responsibility and development.

PiC recognised the need to have a clear strategy plan; it was with this objective that it launched its first strategy plan a decade ago in 1995. The year, starting April 2006, marks the entry of PiC into its Third Strategy Plan period, 2006–2010.

Today, in order to engage more effectively with CR issues in the developing country context, PiC allies with a wide range of international networks and regional groupings comprising business and civil society. PiC has also acted as a secretariat to the Mumbai chapter of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) from 2001 to 2003 and has been endorsing and promoting the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (UN norms) through its associations with various expert groups and committees.

About SRI-IMRB

The Social and Rural Research Institution (SRI) is a specialist unit of IMRB International, the country’s leading Market Research Company. SRI is devoted exclusively to social and rural research. Social research encompasses research on issues that bring about and influence social change whereas r ural research is r esearch on issues related to social development or social and commercial marketing in the rural areas. SRI has a successful record of providing to the clients critical inputs in the design, development, implementation and evaluation of social development and marketing projects. Research conducted by SRI provides information about a programme in terms of its goals, objectives, activities, outcomes, impact and costs. SRI uses scientific methods to measure the implementation and outcome of programmes for decision-making purposes. The methodology used includes Qualitative and Quantitative techniques, Participatory Rural Approaches (PRA) and participatory or micro-planning approaches. SRI has a dedicated team of researchers with a social development background in Education, Health, Public Health, HIV or AIDS, Nutrition and other social sciences.

For data collection, SRI has 15 field offices equipped to conduct fieldwork across all geographical locations in India. In each of these locations, SRI has investigators, fluent in the regional languages and the local dialects. This enables SRI to conduct studies in all major Indian languages. SRI’s clientele includes bilateral or funding or UN agencies, central and state governments and their departments, NGOs and technical units, for instance, CARE, Population Services International (PSI), AIDS Prevention and Control (APAC), and corporate and other clients such as Tata Chemicals and Hindustan Lever. SRI also has a proven track record of conducting studies in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and other neighbouring countries.

PiC and SRI-IMRB have a long association with each other, dating back to 1997 when IMRB first conducted PiC’s CR survey. SRI-IMRB has, since then, conducted a nationwide survey of corporations to assess their involvement in and attitude to social responsibility and development, on a triennial basis for PiC. The fourth and most comprehensive in the series of these surveys — a CR survey spanning 540 companies in India — is currently in progress.

Background to the Project

If the CR initiatives being mounted by players in the Indian industry are anything to go by, the CR concept is clearly making deep inroads into the collective consciousness of Industry in India. This widespread awakening and the resultant involvement of business professionals in the discharge of social responsibility is driving the need for training and education in this area. With this phenomenon, Indian business academia finds itself confronted with the challenge of imparting training in the area of CR to the managers it produces. At its Annual Team Meeting in August 2006, PiC placed ‘providing business leaders of tomorrow with the skills for social and environmental stewardship’ at the forefront of its agenda until 2010. Specific objectives of its new programme are to:

1. Raise management students’ interest in and their capacity to engage with the CR agenda.
2. Increase business awareness of, and support to, the CR agenda in Management Institutions.
3. Recognize and reward CR skills of young managers in the recruitment process.
4. Integrate CR education (research and teaching) in the core curricula of Management Institutions.