42 Devleena Ghosh and Amit Jain
2014). Bachchan, whose endorsements are highly sought, publicly swept streets
and picked up garbage in Mumbai as part of his contribution.
The Government of India also demonstrated excellent use of public
communication and social media in promoting this campaign. The CEO of
Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, promised to help the government create a “Swachh
Bharat” or “Clean India” app, but local entrepreneurs beat him to the game. The
web is now flooded with a number of such free apps that are available in the
Android Play Store. One of them promises to map the efficacy of local initiatives;
another app marks out a city’s debris hotspots. Another created by an engineering
graduate who also holds an MBA in sustainable energy and product design
management enables users to track and report unclean places in their locality
(Inc42 2014). The Union Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation encouraged
people to directly upload photos of unused or unclean toilets on their website and
on social media through mobile phones or tablets (The Hindu 2015).
For businesses, making green marketing part of their core strategy poses several
challenges (Welling and Chavan 2010). Green marketing implies that products
and services are produced sustainably; this may, for example, involve appropriate
technology, new or modified, and green power/energy as well as a change to branding
(such as eco-labeling). These manufacturing transitions may initially be costly in
contexts where many customers balk at paying premium prices for green products.
Green marketing, to be effective, requires companies to undertake effective and
innovative public relations to communicate the benefits of environmentally friendly
products and persuade consumers to pay higher prices for obvious additional benefits
(such as non-polluting, fuel-efficient vehicles and household products manufactured
with non-hazardous materials). Most businesses, therefore, subsumed environmental
concerns within community development and philanthropic activities, distinguishing
them from core business objectives. It is only recently that sustainable development,
production, and consumption have been linked to CSR, and there is widespread
acknowledgment that business organizations have responsibilities not only to
shareholders but also to the society within which they function (Agarwal and Tyagi
2010). As mentioned above, on April 1, 2014, India was the first country in the world
to mandate CSR through new CSR guidelines requiring companies to spend 2 per
cent of their net profit on social development (Prasad 2014).
In this context, most respondents to our survey rated the seriousness of
environmental concerns highly but also concluded that environmental degradation
had increased in the last decade (Tables 3.1 and 3.2). These responses show that
consumers are concerned about environmental protection but think that not enough
is being done by the appropriate and responsible actors to ameliorate such problems.
As far as Indian consumers are concerned, the 2012 Greendex survey found that 57
per cent of them were choosing to buy environmentally friendly products (National
Geographic 2012), while Nielsen research puts India among the top three Asia Pacific
countries, along with Vietnam and Indonesia, which showed a strong affinity for eco-
friendly products (The CSR Journal 2014). Consumers showing the largest increase
in environmentally sustainable behavior were in India, Russia, and the United States
(Howe et al. 2010). In 2014, Fairtrade India, an organization that works to enable