Care About CSR in Education? 3 Industry Players Suggest Ways There is clearly no denial in fact that the sector in itself has become a lucrative one.

Since the time 2 percent of Corporate Social Responsibility for companies has been made mandatory by the government.

With a lot of schools, institutions, coaching and training centers mushrooming nowadays, education has not just remained confined to knowledge and ideas. The sector is now a full-fledged means of earning.

Education sector in India is seeing great involvment of corporates in making a sacred land of schools and institutions to profitable business models under modern architecture.

3 routes that entrepreneurs can take to inculcate education in their purview of Corporate Social Responsibility practices.

• "A good project gets opportunity by itself in Social Entrepreneurship"

On asking how he sees corporate social responsibility taking part in education, the ex-social entrepreneur, Piyush Sehgal says "CSR has not played a very significant role for us because I think India is a country where you need to know people to get the CSR. But sometimes when you have a good project, there are so many people in that industry who are sitting there and waiting for that good project to begin. Therefore, as I see there should be more transparency in figuring out good projects."

He further elaborates that we are talking about education, skills, teachers, technology. All these things are like zeroes. Like many zeroes. Unless you put that one in beginning and that one is what revolution we can bring internally in people? "Education without values is as useful as it may seem can create a clear and a cleverer devil."

• "CSR makes a huge impact in establishing foundations"

Sangeetha Krishnan, an educationist said that "Apart from complete foundations and trusts, we have seen lot of role CSR playing. CSR has made huge impact even in the establishment of other education centers also."

Reaffirming the fact that education without value has no meanings, Sangeetha, as an educator said that things like value education, skill development, personality development, value inculcation, all these have to be in-built and internalized to everything we do in school. Therefore for the teaching programmes about which we have heard. The idea should not be just teaching students, it's also about the learning from children.

• "Facilitating youth via digital means"

While the coaching chain foundation Avanti is facilitating youth in getting free mentoring and coaching, the co-founder of Avanti, Akshay Saxena on CSR in education says "I think it's important to recognize that it is a competitive marketplace. Most times it is very easy to think of entire landscape of corporate giving up when we are trying to do something good. But I think it's important because it's the pool of money which makes it as competitive as actual money that we book from industrialists.

He further adds that in six years of time, when Avanti raised its early funding, it was from US investors and VCs, as this was a new enterprise and the idea was still unproven. In last two years there are many other things which have changed. But overly in last 7 years, two very encouraging thing had happened, I think one, the govt. system has become a lot more open to people play a partnership role. The biggest driver in that is that mass recruiter children from govt. school in low cost prices.