The CSR Journey

With an intent to uplift the society and the community at large, Tata Power has always been instrumental in driving activities which impacts the community and other stake holders and help them develop themselves. As a part of my ACE development progress, I got an opportunity to contribute in this field in the form of CSR Projects at Jojobera and Kalinganagar.

The journey of CSR started with Jojobera where the target was to complete 2 Projects – To revisit the Community Engagement Index (CEI) and test it by implementing it on one of the intiative; and to implement the ‘Swachh Bharat – The Tata Power Way’ initiative at Jojobera. After the CEI was finalized in consultation with Prof. Madhukar Shukra, Professor – XLRI, Jamshedpur, the task was to test the Index on one of the initiative. Under one of the thrust areas of CR – VIDYA which aims at augmenting rural primary education system with emphasis on girl child education, the CR Team at Jojobera have undertaken several initiatives to improve the quality of life of people through education. The CEI was calculated on the basis of 3 factors – the feedback from the community, the feedback from the volunteers of Tata Power and the Outcome of the initiative. The CEI score obtained at the end of the initiative was 90.2%. The second part of the project was on implementing the Swachh Bharat initiative at Jojobera. A competition was rolled out among all the departments of Jojobera where each department nominated one ‘Swachhta Sutradhar’ from their department for whom a training was conducted on ‘5S’ by Mr. Supratik Mukherjee. Each department engaged themselves for a period of 3 days to clean their workstations in line with 5S principle. A jury comprising of external and internal members audited each of the department and Safety Department was crowned as ‘The Most Swachh Department’ of Jojobera.

After completing these two projects at Jojobera, the destination shifted to Kalinganagar to complete the third and the final project of CR Stint. This time the project was on ‘Community Need Assessment’ for IEL – Kalinganagar. There are 12 villages identified as the scope of the community at Kalinganagar which comprises of approximately 2,918 households and 11,273 people. The objective was to meet these people and study their current situation and understand their immediate and long term needs and also prioritize the needs of the community and recommend the key initiatives to be undertaken to improve the overall scenario. After conducting a detailed community need exercise some of the key needs which emerged were to ensure clean drinking water for the community members as the water at Kalinganagar has very high iron content; to sensitize people to develop Rural Toilets at their homes which will help in making the community Open Defecation Free; To sensitizing the Parents on Importance of Education (primary as well as higher education) and at the same time improve Functional Literacy of Parents and improving involvement of students through Summer Camps, Competitions, etc.; Training the youth on Skill Development and Re-starting the SHG’s and arranging work for them such as Papad making, mushroom cultivation, Agarbatti, etc and Integrating the services in IEL Premises for Market Linkage

The overall experience has been full of learning and the exposure of having spending time with the community members has made an important impact on my approach to look at any situation in life. I feel each and every employee must undergo a CSR stint in their life. This would help each one of us to become a complete professional.