Garima Dutt is the President of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at YES BANK and the Chief Executive Officer of YES Foundation, the bank’s philanthropic arm.
A postgraduate from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and a certified Sustainability Leader from London Business School, Dutt has over 16 years of experience working across diverse sectors such as automotive with Tata Motors, pharmaceuticals with GlaxoSmithKline, and corporate foundations like Reliance Foundation.
Her journey reflects a steadfast commitment to embedding sustainability and social impact within corporate frameworks, crafting innovative initiatives that empower rural and semi-urban communities.
“Sustainability is not just a goal; it’s a necessary lens through which we redefine business success,” she said in a recent interview.
From Field Surveys to Boardrooms
Dutt’s journey began with Tata Motors’ nascent CSR division in 2006, where she helped embed social responsibility into the company’s manufacturing ecosystems across India.
Working on greenfield projects in Singur, Uttarakhand, and Dharwad, she spent time directly with communities to design skill development and livelihood interventions that responded to local realities rather than corporate optics.
This immersive field experience shaped her conviction that effective CSR begins with listening. “The best ideas emerge not from air-conditioned offices but from dusty field surveys where one can feel the pulse of change,” she once shared during a CSRBOX impact session.
Her decade-long tenure across Tata Motors, Reliance Foundation, and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) steadily built her expertise in corporate-community relations, stakeholder engagement, and sustainability reporting.
At GSK, she led employee volunteering and global health outreach covering 21 countries, alongside promoting diversity and inclusion agendas through women’s leadership initiatives.
By the time she joined YES BANK in 2021, Dutt had developed a systems-driven approach to social investment one focused not just on donations but on data, design, and delivery.
Building Impact with Purpose
Under her leadership, YES Foundation has evolved into a dynamic platform amplifying the power of corporate non-profit collaboration.
The foundation has touched more than 40,000 lives through projects spanning youth employability, climate resilience, and rural entrepreneurship.
In one of her recent initiatives, YES Foundation partnered with the Ambuja Foundation to train 1,000 semi-urban youth across six states, with programmes carefully structured to ensure over 55 per cent female participation.
These numbers reflect strategy more than scale a philosophy Dutt articulates repeatedly: “Our focus is not on how many we reach, but how deeply we transform those we do.”
Her stewardship is also anchored in strategic partnerships. In a 2025 interview with The CSR Universe, she emphasised that real impact requires “aligning business goals with social outcomes” and using technology to bridge skill and opportunity divides.
Within YES BANK’s framework, every CSR initiative is mapped against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, ensuring that impact is both local and globally accountable.
These corporate linkages demonstrate how Dutt’s approach has matured from compassion to coherence, blending purpose with operational precision.
Transforming Social Capital into Human Potential
Beyond metrics and mandates, what makes Garima Dutt’s work impactful is her view of CSR as a tool for building dignity. YES Foundation’s approach to the 3Es Employability, Entrepreneurship, and Environment creates an integrated model for long-term development.
Employability programmes groom youth for jobs in BFSI and IT sectors, while entrepreneurship projects nurture local self-sufficiency through micro-enterprises. Environmental initiatives, from tree plantations to farmer resilience programmes, address climate risks while sustaining rural incomes.
Dutt attributes much of this success to her team and implementing partners. “Each partnership teaches us something new about collaboration it’s how we turn intent into innovation,” she said during the Foundation’s 12th-anniversary event in 2024.
The institution’s focus on peer learning among grassroots NGOs and corporate volunteers underlines her commitment to cultivating leaders who think beyond their immediate projects. For her, CSR is less about compliance and more about conscience.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Garima Dutt’s journey is a testament to how determined leadership can convert corporate intent into community wellbeing. Her career reminds us that real change often emerges from sustained dialogue, humility, and shared accountability between boardrooms and villages.
The Logical Indian commends her belief that every youth trained, every woman entrepreneur empowered, and every farm made more resilient contributes to a more empathetic India. Her model challenges others in industry to ask what if every corporate leader viewed profit not as an endpoint but as a means to strengthen the nation’s social fabric?
