CSR Spending in India: State, Sector & Company Data (FY2025)

Corporate social responsibility in India stopped being a rounding error a long time ago. What began in FY2014-15 as a new legal duty is now one of the country’s largest pools of private development money – tens of thousands of crores flowing every year into education, health, water, livelihoods and the environment. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs publishes all of it, company by company, on its National CSR Portal. Read together, the numbers tell a clear and slightly uncomfortable story: CSR is growing fast, but it clusters in a handful of states, a handful of sectors and a handful of companies – and reported spend is not the same thing as verified impact on the ground.

How much CSR does India spend?

National CSR expenditure has more than quadrupled in a decade, rising from ₹10,066 crore in FY2014-15 to ₹40,794 crore in FY2024-25 – a compound growth of roughly 15% a year, and a single-year jump of almost ₹4,900 crore over FY2023-24. Across the eleven years, companies have deployed more than ₹2.6 lakh crore through CSR.

Which states get the most CSR funding?

CSR money follows corporate head-offices, not need. In FY2024-25 the top 5 states absorbed 54% of all CSR and the top 10 took 74% – while the entire North-East, the hill states and most Union Territories together received a sliver. Maharashtra alone accounts for more than a fifth of the national total.

One line in the data deserves attention: ₹1,606 crore (3.9%) is classified as Pan India – money reported against national funds or more than one state, with no single location attached. It is CSR that is reported, but not geographically verifiable. For the full state-by-state breakdown and the fastest-growing states, see our CSR spending by state analysis.

What does CSR actually fund?

For all the breadth Schedule VII allows, CSR spending is strikingly narrow. In FY2024-25, Education (₹13,877 Cr) and Health Care (₹8,531 Cr) together took 55% of every rupee. The entire climate-and-environment cluster – environmental sustainability, conservation and agro-forestry – came to under 10%, and genuinely future-facing heads such as technology incubators drew effectively nothing.

The sector split is where the independent-verification gap is widest: rural, livelihood, agriculture and environment programmes are spread across thousands of sites, which makes them the hardest to check and the most exposed to leakage. See the full breakdown in our sector-wise CSR analysis.

Who spends the most on CSR?

CSR is as concentrated by contributor as it is by geography. In FY2023-24 – the latest year with the full all-company breakdown – the top 10 companies alone accounted for about ₹5,777 crore, roughly 16% of national CSR, led by HDFC Bank and Reliance at close to ₹900 crore each. Private (non-PSU) companies outspent public-sector units by 6.4 to 1 (₹31,092 Cr vs ₹4,826 Cr).

Provisional FY2024-25 figures for NSE-listed firms show the concentration only tightening – Reliance at roughly ₹1,310 crore, HDFC Bank ₹1,068 crore and TCS ₹960 crore. The full ranking and the PSU split are in our top CSR companies analysis.

The gap the data hides: did the money land?

Here is what the National CSR Portal cannot tell you. Every figure above is money reported as spent – disbursed from a CSR budget. None of it confirms that a school was built, a plantation survived, a farmer was trained, or a beneficiary exists. CSR data captures spend, not delivery. And for large programmes, independent verification is no longer optional: under Rule 8(3) of the CSR Rules, a company with a CSR obligation of ₹10 crore or more must have big projects (outlay of ₹1 crore or more) independently assessed – by an agency that is not the implementer.

• Nationwide reach – a field force across 540 districts, 11,000+ pincodes and 26 states, so verification covers a whole programme footprint, not a convenient sample. See our field coverage.
• Independent by design – Anaxee does not run the programmes it checks, which is exactly what Rule 8(3) requires.
• Tech + AI evidence – geo-tagged, timestamped, photo-backed capture with AI-assisted checks that make large-scale field data consistent and hard to fake.

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