Adds sparkle to women’s lives in Sambalpur
Bhubaneswar/Kalinga voice: Aditya Birla Group company, Aditya Aluminium’s CSR Project Saksham, is changing the lives of underprivileged women in the Rengali block of Sambalpur district spread over 23 villages in six gram-panchayats in Odisha. Enlisting 853 members across 78 Self-Help Groups and honing their skills, Aditya Aluminium has helped these women rise on their own.
Various structured entrepreneurship and economic empowerment programmes have helped provide them with a reasonable income. Five SHGs have registered a 15% increase in their income in the last 5 months, 15 SHGs have been offered loan linkages. Aditya Aluminium has adopted 22 new units and facilitated 150 women access government schemes. The Saksham project has infused in these women a new spirit, captured in just two words that is “We Can. We Will”.
Under this CSR programme, Aditya Aluminium adopts SHGs, reaches out to the women through a dedicated facilitator who is instrumental in holding meetings, providing training on income generation activities, mobilising government funds and linking them with government schemes.
Over the past one year, the CSR team has reached out to villages, assessing resources and ways to leverage their capabilities and interest. Based on that assessment, more than 100 women are chosen for income generation activities which fetch high returns with minimum investment. Among these activities are mushroom cultivation, paper bag making, turmeric processing, leaf plate making, tailoring, poultry, goat farming, pisciculture and the like. On an average, the women are earning nearly Rs 5,000 per month. There’s more. During the pandemic, those with tailoring skills have been able to earn anywhere between Rs 40,000 to Rs 70,000 in just three months.
To kindle entrepreneurship spirit, the team also helps these women to turn over a new leaf by starting their own independent business such as phenyl production, poultry farming and tailoring.We tell them, we are your torch bearer, but you need to pick up the cudgel and run ahead.
Lauding this initiative, Mr Kailash Pandey, Unit Head, comments, “This is a very heart-warming project because we have been able to help so many women lead a better quality of life through economic independence. It has bolstered their confidence as well as self-esteem significantly. We are much encouraged by our iconic Chairperson, Mrs. Rajashree Birla, Chairperson, Aditya Birla Centre for Community Initiatives and Rural Development, who believes that we must Engage, Uplift and Empower our women”.
“Going forward, we want to focus our efforts on skill development of youth through vocational courses, but our primary focus will be on strengthening good agricultural practices through multi-cropping and introducing cash crops to improve per capita income in the area,” says Kailash Pandey, the Unit Head of Aditya Aluminium.
The Aditya Birla Group feels very encouraged by the positivity that its CSR projects generate at the ground level.
