News

Three Hands in India

We comment on a vital societal issue in India and report on the community-based employee reward programme we ran for Standard Chartered Bank in Delhi.

Most people know of Bangalore as the city leading India's IT boom, providing many services to Western businesses and receiving vast sums of foreign investment. It is also a city struggling to cope with the influx of hundreds of thousands of people from the rural areas hoping to find work in an already over-crowded city. Its badly undeveloped infrastructure struggles to support the business boom. The result, as in practically all India's major cities, is a huge social and economic divide between the have's and have-nots. As the shiny new offices spread, so do the slums.

While the cities expand, the rural farms and villages suffer from a breakdown in traditional farming methods caused by both labour reduction and the spread of patented seeds by multi-national companies. The sharing of traditional seeds amongst farmers has for generations sustained the many indigenous crops that have historically fed India's population. This ancient practice is under threat from the growth of GM crops many of which have failed to provide the economic boom promised for the rural areas. Hundreds of farmers have committed suicide.

The problems of the urban and rural areas do not exist in isolation. They are inter-connected, both exacerbated by a desire for massive economic growth. Businesses, especially those in the West benefiting from the expertise and relatively cheap labour, have a responsibility to understand and engage effectively and sustainably with all sectors of India's society.

These are just some of the issues we might focus on in linking companies and communities in India, and we've been building relationships with local community organisations that deal with these issues and many more. If you'd like to know more, please do contact us.

On a separate note, we were selected by Standard Chartered Bank to set up and manage a five day Reward Volunteering Programme in Delhi for six of their employees. The employees, from Hong Kong, New York, Falkland Islands, Jordan, Uganda and Australia were chosen to take part because of their excellent performance both at work and within their local communities. Standard Chartered focus their community work on HIV Aids, visual impairment, the environment, and empowering women. The first two themes provided a focus for this programme.

Naz India is a charity that provides a care home for children born with HIV, a care at home service for families with HIV and AIDS, and a support group for gay men. Naz participates in GOAL, a programme set up by Standard Chartered to encourage and empower girls in schools and villages by playing netball. The group visited all these projects and worked with the charity's management to suggest improvements to their standard operating procedures.

Venu Eye Institute runs eye hospitals and clinics in northern India and participates in Standard Chartered's Seeing is Believing programme. The group spent a day visiting a hospital on the outskirts of Delhi and engaging with young people with visual impairments who were taking part in an education programme run by Venu.