CSR Spending by Sector in India: Where the Money Goes (FY2025)

Schedule VII of the Companies Act lists everything CSR is allowed to fund – education, health, poverty, gender, environment, rural development, sports, technology incubation and more. In practice, companies cluster around a few safe, high-visibility causes. The result is a development portfolio that is heavy on social infrastructure and strikingly light on climate, innovation and the hardest social problems. Here is where every CSR rupee actually went in FY2024-25. For the national picture across states and companies, see our CSR spending in India hub.

What does CSR money fund? The sector breakdown

Education and Health Care alone absorb 55% of all CSR. After them, spending drops off sharply into environment, livelihoods and rural development, then into a long tail of smaller heads.

What CSR barely funds

The tail of the table is as telling as the top. In FY2024-25, technology incubators received effectively nothing, slum-area development drew about ₹38 crore, and setting up homes, hostels and orphanages a few crore each. The whole climate-and-environment cluster – environmental sustainability, conservation of natural resources and agro-forestry combined – came to roughly ₹3,911 crore, under 10% of all CSR, even as climate risk rises up every corporate agenda. For companies routing environmental work through CSR, this is open space: agro-forestry, plantation and nature-based programmes are under-funded and, when funded, notoriously hard to verify. That is where Anaxee’s climate and plantation geo-tagging work sits.

Why the sector mix is a verification problem

The sectors that are easiest to photograph – a classroom, a hospital wing – are also the easiest to verify. The sectors with the widest footprint – rural development, livelihoods, agriculture, environment – are spread across thousands of farms and villages, which makes them the hardest to check and the most exposed to leakage and over-reporting. These are exactly the programmes Rule 8(3) requires to be independently assessed once a project crosses ₹1 crore, and exactly where a desk-based assessor cannot go.

• Sector-agnostic field reach – education, health, livelihood, plantation or rural programmes verified across 540 districts and 11,000+ pincodes.
• Built for the hard sectors – farmer, agriculture and plantation verification where the footprint is widest. See CSR agriculture & livelihood verification.
• Geo-tagged, AI-checked evidence – timestamped, location-stamped capture that stands up to an auditor or a board.

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