After a trial of about a year, in September 1997 this Council evolved the draft guidelines from the contribution of over thirty-five community coordinators from all major Tata companies. This team planned to use networking as a solution to deeply embed social responsibility into the business processes of Tata companies. This is against all temptations of creating a conventional separate 'organisation' for this purpose. The Tata Company will always be the locus of activity, and in fact, our effort only helps companies to perform better.

The common approach to community development ensures that every activity or project is checked out on certain important aspects of development and values we collectively agree upon.

At another level, it was necessary to recognise that a business enterprise generates talent, expertise, skills and organising power useful to facilitate programmes for self-help communities, besides providing monetary assistance. This opens up infinite opportunities for employees, even beyond those designated for this work, to serve the community. So, volunteering assumes the centre stage and enables creative and talented individuals to become a medium for social service.

In order to support this transformation, major thrust areas were needed for this work to be compatible to corporate interventions : vocational training, education, building awareness and empowerment in general, computer education and application in particular, health, focus on women and children and other forms of sustained development. Similarly, to facilitate the process of strengthening on individual company's initiatives, Regional Groups were formed in five major cities in the country, so that, as teams they can perform better.

Performance Management System is extended to recognise employee performance and also enhance accountability. A social evaluation system helps to measure the impact of programmes with respect to predetermined objectives.

An attempt is now made in the revised version to apply the Tata Business Excellence Model, where applicable to community development activity, as a beginning towards providing the management and employees with the consistency to equate social responsibility to all other assignments in the company.

The effort in the coming years would be to progressively enrol volunteers so that the value for discharging social responsibility is shared by a large resource base. This would be a gradual process with some planned interventions and more of learning-from-doing.

In course of time our aim is to bring about a more formal process of review, accountability and tracking to constantly improve upon past performance and to also generate a satisfactory internal substantiation providing the assurance on our part to the Group's vision to build self-reliant communities.

1st August, 2000

Anant Nadkarni
General Manager - TCCI