Tatas Draft Community Development Plan For Group

The Tata Council for Communicative Initiatives has drafted a set of broad guidelines for community development for the Tata group.

The guidelines are aimed at raising questions at specified stages or levels at which the companys commitment to the community becomes explicit. Under these levels the particular company will have to generate its own community development policy and activities based on its business its core competence and its overall operating situations.

The guidelines aim at generating enquiry at measuring the commitment at the company level, measuring the impact at the programme level, motivating employees through the Tata Corp of volunteers, mobilising resources, building partnerships and networking, both external and internal, and responsibilities of the regional groups.

 

A Tata company must have dedicated arrangements in place to ensure that its respect for the community is in fact delivered and enhanced, the basic four levels at which a company could demonstrate its involvement are commitment at policy level, support at budgetary and resource level, special arrangements at organisational levels, schemes for involvement at employee levels, the guidelines said.

At the company level we leave it entirely to the company to select its programmes suitable to its situations. At the Tata group level our focus will mainly be on community development in the areas and projects which will promote water management in rural areas, vocational training in rural and urban communities, and literacy programmes with a focus on women and especially the girl child, waste management with a view to building partnerships between NGOs, the community, local authorities, and other players, family welfare schemes with a focus on family planning education and community health, and Tata companies operating in specialised field of information technology (IT) or consultancy may extend their expertise to build capacities for NGOs, government and development agencies besides helping in other fields of education, the guidelines specified.

As part of the programme at community development the group has committed around Rs 120 crore for various activities, and TCCI has initially selected 10 companies to implement the guidelines.

These include Titan, Tata IBM, Tata Metallics, Tata Chemicals, Tata Electric, Telco, Tata Exports, the Taj group, Tata Honeywell, Tata Infotech, and Tata Housing. Of these 10 the group plans to conduct a social audit for eight companies in the first year, which will be subsequently repeated in other group companies.

The Tata guidelines for community initiative are in the form of an enquiry.

There is no holistic answer for all the issues on social responsibility: we need to question some of the traditional aspects of community development. Once we are through with all this, we can convert the guidelines into an evaluation criteria with a marginal effort, Anant Nadkarni, general manager TCCI told Business Standard.

While the individual Tata group companies will be free to implement community development programmes on their own, the TCCI is aiming for the first time a group level activity and national programme that the group collectively stands for.

The initial mandate for the initiative is to be seen as a group, and to draw up a common direction to Tata community development programmes. In times to come TCCI could also help evolve similar community development philosophy for other corporate groups as well, Nadkarni said.