Community

Partnerships and stakeholder engagement are key pegs of our sustainability strategy. They help us identify sustainability priorities, provide direction to our efforts and impart a greater degree of sustainability to our programs. Networking and forging alliances facilitates innovation and speedy program implementation.

A structured process of engagement is adopted using a three-pronged approach – keeping the stakeholders informed, engaging with them and forging partnerships to address needs and concerns.

Besides having a dedicated team of in-house environment professionals, we also partner with subject specialist agencies such as the concerned Government agencies, universities, research institutes, industry bodies, consultants, etc. to drive special initiatives on water, air and solid waste management.

Our partnerships with communities, government and civil society (what we term the Public-Private-People-Partnership (4P) model) is fundamental to our work with the communities.

Government: We have successfully assisted government in enhancing both outreach and quality of services, and adding value in education, health, water and sanitation, infrastructure and agriculture sectors.

Civil society: Our partnerships with NGOs, research institutions, and other organisations have enabled us not only to build upon and deepen existing community development initiatives, but also bring in the highest quality of expertise and skills in community development to our project areas. We have a set of guidelines in place for the selection of our civil society partners. This year we partnered with around 100 NGOs.

People: Key driver in our approach towards Community development are our people. At each Business Unit, our socially responsible investments in education, health and livelihood are being managed by dedicated teams of 62 full-time employees and 170 volunteers.

Performance: Through our programmes, we reach out to more than 2.5 million people across India and in Zambia in 1001 villages.

Ongoing interaction with our partners helps us better understand the partnering process, look at new opportunities and scale our programmes both in scope and reach. In line with our stakeholder engagement initiatives we invited 23 of our NGO partners to interact with our Chairman and the senior management, reiterating our commitment. The key action points from this engagement were how to further strengthen the partnership and innovate for solutions in an integrated and sustainable manner.