Corporate social responsibility has been a much bandied term ever since liberalisation pushed Indian corporates to adopt the professed business ethics of the developed world. The Tata group is now trying to evolve this as yet nebulous concept in India on a tangible scale by drawing up a special CSR index it calls the Tata Index for Sustainable Human Development. The index has been developed by the Tata Council for Community Initiatives (TCCI) to benchmark the contributions of Tata companies toward social development and protection of the environment. 

Fifteen group firms have already adopted this benchmark and five others — Tata Chemicals, Tata Tinplate, Indian Hotels, Titan, and Tata Steel — have completed an initial benchmarking exercise of their CSR activities. "We have worked closely with United Nation Development Programme to develop this index, which establishes a correlation between the Tata Business Excellence Model and the UN's human development index," Anant Nadkarni, a general manager at TCCI, told Times News Network.

Group companies are required to undertake a points-based self evaluation based on several criteria such as leadership commitment, strategy development, review mechanism, employee involvement, volunteer schemes, and managing change. They have to rate their performance on these parameters on a scale of 0-1,000, called the 'scale of human excellence', which has five sub-bands, namely, human consideration (Scale: 0-250), human concern (251-450), human- achievement (451-650), human development (651-875), and human excellence (876-1,000).

"If a firm is at the 'human consideration' stage (scale: 0-250), it means its CSR activities are rudimentary," Nadkarni explained. A firm in the 'human concern' band is "still evolving its value system" while at the next stage (human achievement), its "employees demonstrate a high degree of realisation, accomplishment and capability for collective action." "The human development stage is a state of realisation that building a community is central to human survival and growth," Nadkarni explained, "while the 'human excellence' goal is the self expression of people who have a quality of life that is a benchmark for others to emulate."