Deloitte to give a 'lifeline' to its India staff

To launch an intranet portal with database of blood groups of employees

Deloitte, an advisory professional services organisation, will be launching on June 9, 2011 an intranet portal –– Lifeline –– complete with a database of blood groups of all its employees located in Hyderabad to help them in case of emergencies.

“Till now, getting blood from a donor of the same group was a challenge, with the mass communication message reaching only to a set of people. What we are doing this year is, launching the intranet portal, wherein we expect about 80 per cent of our staff to register voluntarily. So, if an employee wants A+ blood, that message goes to all those registered A+ employees in Hyderabad as an alert for them to react,” says Rajnikanth Ivaturi, lead (corporate social responsibility), Deloitte.

 

Lifeline is an extension of Deloitte’s ‘Give a Life’, one of the threads (as they call the community services) that it plans to undertake during the company's social responsibility initiative 'Impact Day’. Initially, we are rolling out Lifeline in the Hyderabad centre. We also have plans to extend this to our other locations in India as it grows,” he adds.

Deloitte currently employs 170,000 globally, of which around 9,000 work out of Hyderabad, and 3,600 from Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata.

Give a Life is all about conducting awareness sessions on organ and blood donation and myth busting. “Our target audience for Give a Life is gated and housing communities and college students, and we expect this to 'impact' around 4,000 people,” Ivaturi says, adding 250 employees of Deloitte were specifically dedicated to this initiative.

The company, on a worldwide basis, celebrates Impact Day every year in June which is the start of its financial year. This year on June 10, all the Deloitte associates will be working at 350 locations in Hyderabad on 28 threads.

Ivaturi says the company is consistently extending its ‘Happiness Behind Bars’ – a thread to help motivate men and women who have been convicted by law and disowned by society – through confidence-building, positive thinking and identification of skills to succeed for the last eight years. So far, close to 1,000 inmates benefited from this initiative.

There are limitations in the number of inmates that Deloitte is allowed to interact with. So, of the 1,200 inmates at the Cherlapally men’s prison and Chanchalguda women’s prison in Hyderabad, Deloitte is planning to train 300 inmates on specific skills like computer fundamentals including desktop publishing, Internet and computer hardware, screen printing, making recycled paper products and photography, Ivaturi says.

“We do get requests to extend Happiness Behind Bars to Mumbai, New Delhi and Guntur jails but we are not going beyond Hyderabad because of our geographical limitations. We, however, are trying to see how we can accommodate those requests,” he adds.