SCIT ISR Summit 2015

On 7th August, 2015 the SCIT ISR summit opened doors to share and promote the sense of Institutional Social Responsibility. The summit brought together delegates from business corporates, officials from various NGOs, the faculty and students of Symbiosis Centre for Information Technology. The learning goal was to discuss existing situations and the future role of students in social responsibility. The summit featured informational presentations which provided guidance on how students can undertake responsibility roles in extending a helping hand to the underprivileged.

The special guest of the summit, Prof. Shaila Kagal, former director of SCIT, graced the occasion by conveying to the audience that SCIT has put forward a pioneering step in social responsibility by implementing several initiatives to make students better individuals by undertaking social responsibility in an organized manner. Prof.Satyajit Majumdar, Chairperson of the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, School of Management and Labour Studies was the key note speaker of the summit. Through his inspiring speech, he not only addressed how business education can help to resolve social issues but also emphasized that sustainable development is the need of the hour. He described the importance of social entrepreneurship and shed light on the myopic picture of education in India, which is favourably tilted towards the urban areas.

The summit also comprised of a panel discussion on the topic, “Shared Vision for Community Development”. Following the discussion, students were given a chance to interact with various NGOs at their stalls and understand the welfare activities carried out by them. The summit created an important positive impact on the minds of students. During a question and answer session at the end, students expressed various learnings that they derived from the summit. There was a vibe of positive energy among the students who realized that a successful individual is one who establishes an equilibrium between what he gets from the society and what he returns to it.

NGO`s

SNEH

SNEH, which stands for “Solid Nutrition Education Health Care” was started in 2011 by Pankaj Bhora. SNEH focuses on providing nutrition to the malfunctioned kids. SNEH in a nutshell includes SWEP (Sneh Women Empowerment Project) : Women Empowerment, Women Employment and Fund Generation.

Cipla

Started in 1997, CIPLA Palliative care improves the quality of life of patients and their families, who are facing problems associated with life-threatening illnesses like cancer. It provides patients with relief from symptoms, pain, physical and mental stress of serious illnesses. Treatment, stay and medicine for patients are free of cost. SCIT SSR Members learned that caring for the terminally ill i.e. Hospice work, is very new and rare in India. They also learned that both palliative and curable treatment can go hand-in-hand and palliative care can extend beyond the curable treatment. Death may be inevitable for terminally ill patients, but we can provide a quality life for their remaining short span of life.

Seva Sahyog

Seva Sahyog Foundation aims at engaging socially conscious corporate, groups and individuals, with NGOs of matching interests. Seva Sahyog is largely a volunteer-run organisation with adequate professional staff backup and well-equipped office set up centrally located in Pune City. Seva Sahyog is powered with a unique skill set of deep understanding of grass root realities and a clear vision of the role corporate India can play to support community initiatives.

LokPanchayat

LokPanchayat was established in the year 1993 and the work began with a voluntarily launched set of key initiatives focusing on revival and promotion of sustainable farming practices, bio-diversity conservation, women emopowerment, enterprise development and liberal school education in real schools.

Serve India Foundation

Serve India Foundation's vision is aligned to the “Swachh Bharat Mission”. They believe that a cleaner India should be a national obsession. Without cleanliness all their efforts towards Health, Education and Employability become harder to achieve. So, Serve India Foundation through its partners and members strives to create schemes for a cleaner India.

Pradnya

Pradnya is a Govt. Authorized Non-Profit Charitable Trust, registered in Chennai, TamilNadu, aimed at serving various social purposes in the society. Started by a group of friends, it has now grown to a large team comprising of development professionals, corporate professionals, consultants, MBAs, CAs who all bring their experiences and perspectives to the organisation and are unified by the common vision of uniting serving minds. Pradnya strongly believes that education is the backbone of a society and focuses primarily on providing education to the underprivileged and orphanage children along with food, clothing and shelter. All that we dream of, is to slowly snowball this social interest into a large community of serving minds and collectively help a larger community of deserving children and bring about a change in the society.

Model Action For Rural Change

The main purpose of Model Action for Rural Change is to build the capacity of Civil Society Organizations through Action Research, Advocacy, Field Level Implementation, Support and Consultancy Efforts to expedite the effectiveness of development of the poor at grassroots and at policy level.

New Vision

New Vision is a Non-Government, Non-religious and an equal rights organisation based in Pune and registered under the societies registration act of 1860 & the Bombay Public Trust Act of 1950. New Vision was formed in 2002 by professionals from various NGOs and working professionals in positions such as social workers, HODs from institutions, supervisors, Project Managers and teachers. This well run NGO has set a vision where every child should get every right set by the constitution of India. The vision of New Vision is “A world where every child, irrespective of economic status is treated equal and has every right of survival, protection, development and participation guaranteed by the country.”

Ajit Foundation

Ajit Foundation was initiated in 2006 at Solapur, Maharashtra led by 7 members to promote education among children. They have instituted a residential school for the children who belong to a tribal community which is blacklisted.

MARCH Foundation

MARCH Foundation is an NGO which prominently concentrates on watershed and agriculture. They have extended a helping hand to 187 villages by providing proper agricultural facilities. They mainly focus on rural development. Another aspect of coverage by this NGO is women empowerment. They are actively contributing in model action for rural change.

Sadhana

Sadhana mainly concentrates on the welfare of people in the cantonment areas of Maharashtra. Due to their hard work they were able to establish an ICDS(Integrated Child Developement Service) centre in one of the cantonment areas. They have also started a school for children. Earlier it was a school only for children upto class four, but now they have enough facilities to handle the education of students upto class ten. They have also worked towards bringing proper toilet facilities in the cantonment areas. They look forward to bring such facilities into all the seven cantonment areas of Maharashtra.

ECA ( Environment Conservation Association)

ECA is managed by Abhinav Global Foundation. Its main areas of concentration are health, education, environment and rehabilitation. So far this foundation has successfully rehabilitated 1700 people suffering from various ailments. It was established 20 years ago and it works towards inculcating moral values among children and also teaches them the importance of conserving the environment. It educates children about the ill effects of river pollutions and also creates awareness about mitigating various factors that cause river pollution. Currently ECA has got more than 5000 volunteers and it has initiated a youth development program. They look forward to gain more volunteers and work towards conserving the environment.

Navkshitij

Navkshitij, “New Horizon” was established on November 27, 2003 in Marunji, a suburb of Pune by Dr. Neelima Desai with prime focus on improving the well-being of mentally challenged adults by creating a home for them. On the day of ISR Summit, Ms. Vasudha Deshpande described about the reason behind establishing Navkshitij as it becomes increasingly difficult for ageing parents to nurture their mentally challenged children as they grow up. In Navkshitij these mentally challenged adults, treated as “Special Friends” are taught life skills, vocational skills and are also taught how to use computers. At present, Navkshitij accommodates 47 special friends who are taken care by 23 volunteers.

Astitva Pratisthan

Astitva Pratisthan was established in 2003 by Ms. Gitanjali and Mr. Santosh to create opportunities for the deprived ones in the society. Astitva Pratisthan works in various domains such as education, health, agriculture, self-employment, tree plantation and vocational training.

Team Everest

Team Everest is a voluntary group of people who serve in helping the needy people with primary focus on “Promoting Volunteerism”. Kartheeban C founded Team Everest in 2006 when he first joined in IT Company. On the day of ISR Summit, Dr.Tejasvini Dhimmar, who is a dentist by profession and also volunteer of Team Everest, gave a presentation on how Team Everest carries out different activities to help children in their education. In her presentation at the summit, she mentioned about two important Verticals on which Team Everest focuses on:
  1. Promoting Volunteering: Team Everest’s dream is “If every person volunteers at least once in a month(12/365), it is going to make a huge difference in society”. In a journey of 9 years, with the support of 8500+ IT employees and volunteers, it has become successful in changing 8,00,000 lives in the society.
  2. Providing Quality Education: Team Everest started helping children in their education by distributing notebooks to around 400 kids. A clear example is when they helped a samosa vendor achieve his dream of becoming an Automobile Engineer by assisting and supporting him in his education. Now, Team Everest has spread into 10 study circles in 10 villages in Chennai where volunteers come from faraway places to help many such children realise their dreams. Apart from education, they conduct various activities like Digital Literacy; Help a kid Read Program, Talent Search Competition to make children proficient in co-curricular activities thereby helping to build their confidence.

AJ Foundation

AJ foundation, stands for “Anjali Foundation”, is a group of professionals, comprising a team of scientists, doctors, management graduates, software professionals, people who work for social causes, psychologists and gerontologists to continually offer the best care possible for elderly people. This team came together to set up "Madhurbhav", a home for senior citizens in order to realize the concept of "Community living and assisted care."

Janaseva Foundation

Dr. Vinod Shah, M.D., renowned gastroenterologist, associated with many prominent hospitals in the city of Pune is the founder-chairman of the Janaseva Foundation. The overpowering inner urge to be of service to people who needed it most got the better of him and he founded the Janaseva Foundation on 15th January 1988.The foundation started functioning from January 1990.

Panel Member(s)

Keynote Speaker - Prof. Satyajit Majumdar, chairperson, School of Management and Labour Studies ,Tata Institute of Social Sciences(TISS)

It was an auspicious day for SCIT when the current batch of SCIT got the opportunity to listen to the wise words of Prof. Satyajit Majumdar, chairperson, School of Management and Labour Studies ,Tata Institute of Social Sciences(TISS).He began his career as a quality engineer in Coal India Limited, continued as a consultant in the area of Quality Management at Indian Statistical Institute and then professor at TAPMI, Manipal. Prof. Satyajit has keen interest in training teachers of entrepreneurship and believes in fostering the idea of social entrepreneurship. TISS graduates ,actively engaged in social entrepreneurship and various NGOs such as Apnishala, Sampoorn(e)arth ,Uncancer India under the valuable guidance of Prof. Satyajit presented their work at the summit.

A new vision of the booming corporate industry was put forward by Prof. Satyajit that further opened the eyes of students to the poor state of development in the nation. He elaborated upon the issues existing in market driven economy. Growth has been occurring in absolute terms ,but the figures are misleading. In reality, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, increasing the absolute gap. Education is exclusive and universities are insensitive to the changes in economy. New business models to cater to the gap are not yet a part of the curriculum. Approximately 92% of the Indian work force are working in the informal sector. Till date, people with less or no resources have almost no place to live dignified lives.

Indian people in rural areas spend nearly 30% of their income just to get water everyday, which is much more than the people in urban areas. This is an indicator of the lack of development. Hence until growth is made inclusive, sustainable development cannot occur.

Prof. Satyajit Majumdar pointed to the prevalent view that Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) is seen as the responsibility of NGOs and not the common man. People fail to realize that the glorifying businesses that we see today did not actually start aiming for profits. Rather, the driving force behind CSR was the legacy of connecting with the society. For instance, Mr.Jamshedji Tata set up a steel plant, Mr. Kirloskar Vani started the first factory to support the farmers, providing them with farm tools, equipments. All such initiatives were not to start a business, but to create the Indian ecosystem of serving. Today, the paradoxical view is that heterogeneity is the pride of India. But farmers are migrating to urban areas due to lack of mechanisation and unviable infrastructure. Farmer jobs are decreasing. All government growth initiatives are aimed at urban development, turning a blind eye to the rural areas. Hence, an entrepreneurial view in the agriculture sector needs to be promoted. The development paradigm needs to change. Inclusive development with convergence of philanthropy and corporate sector is the need of the hour. We should go back and continue the legacy of connecting with society, redefining the relation between social and economic values.

At the end, Prof. Satyajit Majumdar appreciated the SCIT ISR initiative and encouraged B-school students in the journey of utilizing youthful energy to create new business models and sustainable systems. He offered to students of SCIT collaborations and internship opportunities to the students with TISS for various social projects. Prof. Saravan felicitated Prof.Satyajit Majumdar for his wise words that left a deep impact on SCIT students and inspired them to engage in social service.

NGO`s under TISS

Apnishala

Uncancer India

Sampurn(e)arth

CSR manager of Cognizant Technology Solutions

Mr. Abhishek Jain, from Cognizant gave a presentation on corporate social responsibility and briefed the audience about how Cognizant has made a mark in social responsibility through various schemes such as the “Outreach Program”, “Be a Teacher” initiative, and also providing scholarships to deserving and meritorious candidates.