Why SWIFT-CSR Matters

Over the past few years, Corporate India has been navigating a convergence of evolving realities. While CSR spending is now firmly embedded within corporate governance frameworks, a portion of allocated CSR funds continues to remain unutilized at the close of each financial year, with unspent amounts estimated at over Rs.1,900 crore last year. In parallel, India’s overall investment in research and development remains modest in global terms, with national R&D expenditure at approximately 0.7% of GDP.

Taken together, these trends invite reflection on a few important considerations:

What structural or operational factors make timely and effective CSR deployment challenging, despite strong intent and compliance maturity?

How can CSR capital more seamlessly contribute to India’s long-term innovation and research capacity, which underpins sustained economic growth?

And what institutional pathways best enable companies to translate CSR priorities into outcomes that are both compliant and enduring?

Experience at IIT Bombay suggests that well-designed institutional partnerships can meaningfully address these questions. Over the years, CSR collaborations at the Institute have enabled companies to channel their CSR commitments into long-term research capability, infrastructure creation, and societal impact. In FY 2024–25 alone, IIT Bombay entered into 81 new CSR partnerships, contributing to an overall engagement with more than 140 corporate partners, supporting critical research facilities, faculty chairs, early-career faculty recognition, and a wide range of fellowships, scholarships, and student awards.

Several of these partnerships demonstrate how CSR can extend beyond immediate deployment to create lasting national value. The collaboration with the Alkem Foundation, for instance, is advancing an integrated research centre in immunotherapeutics and regenerative medicine, addressing areas of significant unmet medical need. Similarly, the partnership with the SBI Foundation has led to the creation of a Banking Data and Analytics Hub tailored to the evolving requirements of India’s banking and financial services ecosystem.

To further simplify and strengthen such engagement pathways, IIT Bombay has launched initiatives such as SWIFT-CSR, designed to help companies deploy unutilised or time-sensitive CSR allocations into ready-to-implement, high-impact projects. Fully compliant with Schedule VII and aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, SWIFT-CSR reframes CSR from an end-of-year obligation into structured capital for research, infrastructure, and talent development—areas where public universities like IIT Bombay anchor India’s deep-tech and scientific ecosystem.

At IIT Bombay, we believe that when CSR is channelled through structured, institutionally supported research-led collaborations, it can simultaneously address the challenge of under-utilised CSR funds and India’s chronic under-investment in future-oriented R&D—turning obligation into opportunity, and intent into lasting nation-building impact.

We invite corporates to engage with us in shaping this next phase of India’s innovation journey.

To explore how your CSR can create enduring value through SWIFT-CSR at IIT Bombay, please write to us at corporateconnect@iitbacr.com