The steel giant has been supporting youth leadership training in some of India’s remotest areas under a programme that was earlier grandiosely titled ‘Moral Rearmament’. Thankfully, it is now known as just ‘Initiatives Of Change’ (IofC) and has reached out to over 3,500 youth in the last four years. The collection of transformation tales of rural youth, who brought in change in the hinterlands of Jharkhand and Odisha, tells you why corporate social responsibility (CSR) should be looked at as a business process, and not charity. So what Tata Steel Rural Development Society (TSRDS) does is to encourage and enable people to take ownership of a project and replicate it for the good of the next community.
The examples are right there — all 35 of them, each of whom has proved to be an agent of change for the community they belong to. Take the case of Sashmita Mohanto at Ransol village in Odisha’s Jajpur district. This middle-aged wife of a primary schoolteacher stepped out of her home only after she started finding it difficult to run the household on a single income. Mohanto came to know that TSRDS funds women’s self-help groups. Village women, who want to start a business, come together to form these. Each month, they contribute a certain amount of money to a common fund, which is then deposited in the local bank. Once the fund is large enough, they approach the TSRDS, or a bank or another funding body, with a business plan. If the plan is approved, they get money to start the business.
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So Mohanto created a self-help group but her native intelligence made her realise that if the business has to survive, it needs to scale up. Since the village already had five women’s self-help groups of 10 members each — all interested in the poultry business — Mohanto brought all of them under one umbrella organisation and then approached TSRDS to avail of a poultry scheme in which the initial infrastructure, raw materials and operational costs were being offered for free. TSRDS also organised an intensive poultry training programme to all 50 members. Mohanto found a ready market in the village anganwadi and the primary school and today, every member of the self-help group has a poultry coop with 20 chickens. Mohanto has now set her sights higher and would like to form a cooperative to scale up further, not just in poultry but in other cash-rich produce like mushrooms. The high-school pass woman, who has economically empowered 50 women in her village with a soft nudge from TSRDS, is on her way to becoming an entrepreneur.
Or, take Naresh Chandra Pradhan, a farmer who was funded by TSRDS for training in the Orissa University of Agriculture and Technology and Central Rice Research Institute, Cuttack. Pradhan has planted, for the first time, the hybrid G9 variety of banana, which lasts longer in the farm-to-fork cycle and yields fruit for three years. There’s more. Vishnu Kumar Chauhan, who earlier did nothing else but drink cheap liquor, performs awareness plays on alcoholism all over the country after TSRDC trained him in acting.
What makes the stories look real is that Adhikari doesn’t seek to project that it’s roses all the way. Listen to Ravindra Kumar, a young TSRDS executive, who speaks to the author at Joda in Odisha’s Kendujhar district where IofC runs a programme. “If we are lucky, about five to 10 of these 30 girls, will find livelihood as community teachers and health workers. The rest will get lost in the quagmire of poverty and social rejection. There are so many of them,” says Kumar.
The biggest contribution of On The Road… is that it compels you to think beyond lip-service CSR, that is building ad hoc infrastructure and providing mobile ambulances and nothing more. What most corporates forget is that CSR is all about investing deep into lives and livelihoods and empowering and enabling backward communities.