The episode, hosted by development practitioner Gagan Sethi and human rights advocate Minar Pimple, ranged across the evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the rise of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, consumer protection in the platform economy, disaster mitigation, and the deepening problem of inequality in India's growth story.
Parekh, who chairs the Consumer Education and Research Centre (CERC) and serves as senior strategy advisor to the Zydus Cadila Healthcare Group and Jubilant Bhartia, traced his own trajectory from a conventional corporate career to public engagement. He said he stepped away from bottom-line-driven corporate roles in the mid-1990s and spent the following decades working at the intersection of industry associations, disaster rehabilitation and social development.
He credited a village rehabilitation programme he led through the Confederation of Indian Industry's Gujarat office as the formative experience that shaped his thinking, describing it as proof that when corporates, government and civil society collaborate on a shared problem, the results are far more powerful than anything achieved alone. He also spoke of being influenced by his long association with Gagan Sethi and by conversations with Dr Karan Singh that broadened his understanding of pluralism and identity in India.
On CSR, Parekh offered a detailed account of how the practice has shifted from an informal, values-driven activity to a legally mandated one. He said CSR in its origins was individual and heart-driven, traced back to Gandhian ideas of trusteeship, and was not systematised until the 1970s and 80s, when business heads began deciding informally what to fund.
He argued that the liberalisation era intensified competitive pressure among companies, which in turn linked CSR activity to branding and reputation for the first time. This was followed by a phase in which large business families created dedicated CSR structures, often run by family members, to formalise engagement with communities.
When the government mandated CSR spending at 2 percent of profit under the Companies Act of 2013, Parekh said he had initially opposed the law, fearing it would reduce a matter of conscience to a compliance checkbox. In hindsight, he said the law has at least focused corporate attention and introduced fiduciary accountability, even though the sums involved, around Rs 35,000 crore last year against a $4.5 trillion economy, remain modest.
He cautioned that the professionalisation of CSR has coincided with the weakening of civil society organisations themselves, leaving companies to hire well-known individuals into in-house roles rather than genuinely partnering with grassroots groups, a shift he described as breaking the organic link between businesses and the communities that sustain them.
Asked about the mutual distrust between civil society and corporate funders, Parekh identified four points at which corporates typically engage with communities: land acquisition, environmental clearance hearings, consumer-facing product engagement, and social media perception. He said most of this engagement remains adversarial, with industry viewing local opposition as obstruction and communities feeling that decisions are made without consultation, a dynamic he said is worsened by the state's own retreat from land negotiations.
He argued for a "new social contract" bringing together government, industry, civil society, academia and citizens to jointly plan development in the areas that will be affected by it, rather than treating consultation as an afterthought. He was direct in assigning distinct roles to each actor: industry's task is to create jobs, investment and innovation; civil society's task is to act as a watchdog ensuring consumer and environmental protection and the equitable distribution of growth; and government's task is to regulate, incentivise, and balance the tension between equity and market freedom.
Sethi pressed him on the risk of states quietly offloading their core responsibilities in health and education onto corporate CSR budgets, calling this an area that needs careful navigation. Parekh responded that under the law, corporates retain considerable freedom over where CSR money is spent, and cited an example from Ahmedabad in which a corporate voluntarily restored a village water body and public space at the government's request rather than under compulsion.
On ESG frameworks, Parekh described India's Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) requirements, mandatory for the top thousand listed companies, as a genuinely significant development, even though he estimated current implementation is running at about 60 percent of where it should be, with improvement expected over the next year or two. He said the exercise had pushed companies to measure actual energy and carbon data for the first time, rather than only its cost, and had introduced governance reforms such as mandatory quarterly board meetings and record-keeping of dissent.
He argued that ESG ratings have moved beyond a compliance exercise to become strategically valuable, citing their use by banks, prospective foreign executives and trade negotiators, including in the context of new US tariff investigations tied to labour practices in developing countries. He credited industry associations with making ESG implementation more accessible to small and medium enterprises by training shared consultants at a fraction of the cost charged by large global consulting firms.
The conversation turned to inequality, with Sethi pressing Parekh on whether India's embrace of large conglomerates has come at too high a social cost. Parekh defended what he called "responsible capitalism," arguing that dismantling monopoly-restriction laws in the pre-liberalisation era had trapped India in a low-growth economy of 3 to 4 percent GDP growth, while permitting large corporates to scale up has since roughly doubled that rate. He argued that inequality itself is not inherently harmful and can be a source of innovation and employment, and that the real regulatory task is preventing abuse of dominance, citing global technology platforms buying up competitors as an example of the kind of concentration that genuinely needs restraint.
When Sethi countered by invoking India's poor performance on hunger indices and asked whether a company's next innovation should take precedence over a hungry citizen, Parekh reframed the question as one of taxation and redistribution rather than corporate restraint, pointing to the trade-offs developing countries face in competing for investment against lower-tax economies such as Vietnam. He said he would rather accept the excesses of large enterprise than risk sliding into stagnation, invoking the World Bank's concept of the "middle income trap" as the alternative danger.
On consumer protection, Parekh raised concerns about the accountability of e-commerce and platform companies for the products and ratings they host, and about how personal data collected through everyday transactions is used to profile and influence consumers, including politically. He argued that India occupies a relatively unusual middle position globally, attempting to balance the light-touch, growth-first approach of the United States with the more heavily regulated but slower-moving European model, and pointed to India's emerging personal data protection framework, including the right to have personal data removed, as a meaningful step in that direction.
On disaster management, Parekh argued that mitigation investment is dramatically more cost-effective than post-disaster response, citing the development of heat-resistant millet varieties as an example of forward planning against climate-linked food insecurity, and noting the growing role of private technology and logistics capacity in rapid-response infrastructure such as temporary shelters and mobile kitchens.
The episode closed with a discussion of institutional gaps in Indian public life. Parekh said India lacks contemporary equivalents of figures like Sardar Patel, Mahatma Gandhi or Jayaprakash Narayan, whom he described as "conscience keepers" capable of commanding trust across political and social divides.
He proposed identifying and convening a small group of such independent, non-partisan figures, roughly one from each state, free of political or purely commercial interest, to develop a shared strategy document on India's development challenges, and suggested that reviving and publishing the accumulated thinking of the past seventy-five years could help identify and nurture a new generation of such leadership.
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