Whitespace India is preparing a series of reports on CSR spending and need, built on NITI Aayog's poverty index and the CSR filings companies make to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
The first four are described below.
Each report will be published as a long PDF, with an interactive version on this site.
The atlas will profile each whitespace district, meaning a district where CSR spending per person is in the bottom 25% of all districts in the index and the share of people in multidimensional poverty is in the top 25%. Each profile will set the parts of the district's score beside its CSR spending by sector.
This report will set the CSR money spent on education in each district against measures of school provision and child poverty, and identify the districts where spending and need diverge most.
For each of the fifty companies that spend most on CSR, this study will show which districts and sectors receive the money and how that compares with where poverty is highest. It will use ten fiscal years of Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings, adjusted for inflation.
More than fifty districts in NITI Aayog's poverty index did not exist at the time of Census 2011, so the index has to estimate their 2011 populations by dividing the population of the district they were carved from in proportion. This note will show how much those estimates move each district's CSR per person and where the uncertainty is largest.
The index itself is free to use, and its method and background are documented alongside it.
The index ranks 651 districts by their poverty against the CSR spending they receive, and you can download a research brief on any of them.
The methodology sets out each step from the raw data to the score, with the reason for each choice.
The about page explains why the index was built and which public data it draws on.
We send one short email, with a link, each time a new report or district atlas is published.