About the
project.
Quantifying the gap between where philanthropic money goes and where people need it most.
Open data. Reproducible methodology.
The mismatch.
CSR spending in India reached over twenty-one thousand crore rupees (district-attributable) in FY2023-24. Most of that money flows to districts where corporate offices sit. The districts with the deepest poverty receive the least funding per person.
Key Finding // The Mismatch
Figure 01Poverty Headcount
Relative CSR / Person
Poverty Headcount
Relative CSR / Person
Bihar's poverty rate is more than four times Maharashtra's (33.76% vs 7.81%), yet Maharashtra receives roughly 20 times more CSR per person. This tool quantifies that gap for every district.
What this tool does.
Whitespace India CSR ranks every Indian district by the gap between poverty and philanthropic funding. It produces a single composite score, the Philanthropic Opportunity Score, that tells you where capital is most absent relative to need. The simulator lets you adjust weights, filter by sector, and generate district-level research briefs.
Three sources, one ledger.
NITI Aayog MPI
653 districts extracted
MCA CSR Data
10 fiscal years (via Dataful.in)
Census 2011
Population baseline
Merge & Score
651 district POS
Districts are matched across datasets using fuzzy string matching, then grouped into three population tiers for like-for-like CSR benchmarking. Small rural districts are compared to other small districts, not to Mumbai.
The three axes.
Poverty Severity
MPI headcount ratio from NITI Aayog. What fraction of the district's population is multidimensionally poor.
Funding Gap
How much less CSR per person the district receives compared to its population-tier median. Benchmarked against similar-sized districts.
Persistence
What fraction of 2015-16 poverty remains in 2019-21. Districts where poverty has barely moved despite national progress.
POS = (0.40 × N̂ + 0.40 × Ĝ + 0.20 × Û) × 100
Each dimension is min-max normalized within its population tier, then combined. Weights are adjustable in the simulator.
Who this is for.
Program Officers
Deciding where to open a new grant window
CSR Heads
Reporting geographic strategy to the board
Philanthropic Advisors
Building investment cases for clients
Researchers
Studying CSR allocation and equity patterns
The ledger line.
The citations.
NITI Aayog National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023, based on NFHS-5 (2019-21), using the Alkire-Foster method from OPHI, University of Oxford.
Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India, via Dataful.in (Dataset ID 1612). Ten fiscal years of district-level CSR spending.
Census of India 2011, Registrar General of India. Used for population-tier stratification.
Get in touch.
Questions about the methodology, data, or applying this for your foundation?