Corporate Social Responsibility Case Study

The phrase “Corporate Social Responsibility” originates with H. Bowen, who wrote “Social Responsibility of Businessmen” in 1953. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is broadly used to describe businesses’ integration of social and environmental issues into decisions, goals, and operations. According to World Business Council for Sustainable Development “Corporate Social Responsibility is the continuing commitment by business to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as of the local community and society at large”. There has been a long standing debate between the two views of CSR. The classical view states that “the business of business is business.”
ALP aims at making adults in the age group of 15 - 35 literate. The focus is not only learning how to read, write and count but also make aware of why they are deprived and help them move towards change. Literacy Missions in the States and at Centre level produced the best researched material available in printed form in every Indian Language. However, the drawback was in the form of instruction. ALP is implemented using several methods. The most common conventional method constitutes of tutors teaching in schools or learning centres in given time slots usually in the form of night schools. Trained and dedicated teachers are in short supply. Moreover 1 million teachers need to be trained to achieve 90% literacy rate. The teaching program takes long to administer. The dropout rate is high because of the long duration of the program (6 months to 2 years). The programme aims at wRiting, Reading, & ARithemetic simultaneously hindering the speed of learning. This method will take another 25 years to achieve a 90% literacy
At present CBFL is available in 9 languages (Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia, Kannada and Urdu) in India. The ALP model using CBFL has also been adopted by West Africa and South Africa. It is available in three foreign languages- Northern Sotho (South Africa) and Moore (West Africa) and Arabic.
The benefits of using CBFL method over the conventional method for ALP are as follows.
• The teaching skills required to instruct the conventional method is significantly high compared to CBFL. CBFL does not require trained teachers or school facilities since multimedia is the main source of tutoring. People educated using CBFL themselves can become tutors for the next group.
• Another benefit of CBFL is that the learning pace can be adjusted. Individuals have a different pace of learning and CBFL acknowledges that fact. Timeframe for learning is flexible unlike the conventional method. Furthermore, the learners can use the programme at their own convenient time.
• Also, it has been observed that CBFL has a lower dropout rate. Moreover the effectiveness of learning is higher as the use of multimedia captures attention and motivates. Also, the teaching of pronunciation of words/letters is more accurate due to the use of