South Asian Journal of Social Studies and Economics

The paper focuses on the role of corporate social responsibility in community sustainable development through livelihood generation for empowering rural and marginalized women as an inclusive category to mainstream development. The Multinational Companies especially, in Indian context through CSR are found to promote the social dimension of business-society nexus. CSR often does “implicit CSR” which refers to responsibilities towards employees but “explicit CSR” brings community as stakeholder by focussing on development of health care, infrastructure, education, environment, income generation, women empowerment etc. A gender lens impact assessment of CSR has become significant to understand the discourses on parameters of community development. Odisha’s scenario of rural women’s employability reflects a meagre and underprivileged position of lack of their economic independence and corresponding social status. In this context, the present paper attempts to highlight the CSR initiatives of a Multinational company towards empowering rural women in their livelihood generation through self help group.  With a primary field data being utilized in a descriptive and exploratory research design having a sample size of 100 women from 10 different SHG activities based on the CSR initiatives of Dalmia Bharat Foundation (DBF)located in peripheral villages near Cuttack, the study wishes to highlight on the indicators of women empowerment through interview schedule and focussed group discussions highlighting their nature of mobility, personality development and decision making capacity which has changed with their economic independence and corresponding social empowerment. The study has also utilized the secondary sources of data collection emphasizing the analysis of company’s annual sustainability report. The findings reveals the CSR efforts have improved the living conditions of rural women by providing them with better economic evenues and corresponding social empowerment which is observed by their enhanced mobility and decision making capacity. The research implications enable to have a deeper understanding on the discourses of corporate social responsibility, development, gender inclusion and business-society relationship. The research could suggest in policy making for gender inclusion both at the government and corporate level.