Company: ING Vysya Bank Ltd.
Income 2005-2006 = Rs 1000 Cr (rounded off)
Net profit after tax (05-06) = Rs 40 Cr (rounded off)
Karmayog CSR Rating- 2/5
CSR activities:
World over, the ING Group is strengthening its reputation as a socially responsible company. In line with this, the three business units of ING Vysya (ING Vysya Bank, ING Vysya Life Insurance and ING Vysya Mutual Funds) set up the ING Vysya Foundation over three years ago with the mission being, to promote its community development initiatives in India.
The goal of the Foundation is to promote primary education for underprivileged children.
ING Vysya Foundation was set up almost three years ago actively supported by the three business units of ING Vysya (ING Vysya Bank, ING Vysya Life Insurance and ING Vysya Mutual Fund) to promote its Corporate Social Responsibility. The mandate for the Foundation is to promote primary education for under privileged children. This fits in well with ING Group’s global vision of empowering children through education and ING’s partnership with UNICEF. Accordingly, ING Vysya Foundation’s commitment to empower children through primary education has been the focus in the last three years. In a country with an estimated 50 million children deprived of basic primary education and health care, enormous support, dedication and firm belief is necessary to make a difference and to change the scenario. The foundation’s efforts have very successful in reaching out to underprivileged children and providing them with a platform to learn, grow and achieve through partnerships with 4 non profit organizations located in India.
ING Chances for Children – Global initiative
Background:ING Chances for Children is an ING worldwide corporate program that aims to give 50,000 children in India, Brazil and Ethiopia access to education before the end of 2007 and to improve the quality of education in the local communities in which ING businesses are active.Targets and Objectives:The key objective of the ING Chances for Children program is to improve the well-being of children aged 4-12 worldwide by giving them access to free, compulsory basic schooling that aims to develop each child’s ability to the fullest. ING Chances for Children will be doing this by giving children access to education, by providing the necessary skills and through investment in educational organizations. The main targets of the ING Chances for Children program are:
To provide primary education for 50,000 children over a period of three years.
To improve the quality of education in the communities in which ING businesses are active.
To involve as many of the ING Group’s 115,000 employees as possible, either as ambassadors, volunteers or donors.
By starting local community development initiatives with ING employees and by working together with organizations such as UNICEF, the ING Chances for Children program aims to contribute to the goal of achieving primary education for all children, as stated in both the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
UNICEF PartnershipThe ING Chances for Children program has joined forces with UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, to achieve the target of giving 50,000 children access to education. The program will be supporting educational UNICEF projects in India, Brazil and Ethiopia. The partnership with UNICEF will also enable the local ING business units to team up with local UNICEF offices and take advantage of each other’s unique positions at a community level. A range of other projects and partnerships with other organizations will be started, both internationally and locally. ING Chances for Children – India initiative
In India, along with the ING Vysya Foundation, the ING and UNICEF partnership is focused to provide quality education for working children in Tamil Nadu. 15,000 children will benefit from quality education in 200 learning centers for former child workers under the National Child Labor Elimination Project (NCLP).The project focuses on strategies to provide quality education for children who are either already working in low-paid, low-skilled industries or who are out-of-school and therefore extremely vulnerable to becoming child laborers. In Tamil Nadu the project emphasizes on child-friendly schools, quality education, community involvement and responsibility in ensuring children can learn and build a solid foundation for a hopeful future and make a strong basis for ensuring that children remain in school and complete a course in primary education. Activities will especially focus on preventing child labor, protecting children’s rights and promoting quality education.600 teachers will be reinvigorated through capacity building and professional training pedagogy and motivation. Through workshops with some 180 staff from government departments, UNICEF will cultivate and reinforce supportive alliances in ensure quality education through to working children.
Activities:
Schooling gives Kavitha real opportunities
This is thirteen-year-old Kavitha from India. She started working in a matchbox factory when her father passed away and all her six siblings and her mother had taken up low-paid ad hoc jobs.
In the factory, Kavitha was made to grind a highly combustible and deadly mixture used for making matchsticks. For a day’s work she was paid 30 rupees (‘0.55 or $0.70). ‘My hands were in constant contact with the mixture. Within a few months, they began to turn black,’ she says. Then, the National Child Labour Project (NCLP) pulled her out of the factory and enrolled her in a school. The blackness of her hands still remains, but now she can write.
Restoring Childhoods
In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, NCLP, with support from UNICEF, has been restoring childhoods to children like Kavitha. The children are attending school which gives them more chances for a good future. Kavitha attends a special ‘bridge’ school in Palacode block in Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu. The young girl is making up for the lost time and is passing her grades quicker than in usual schools so that she can join a regular school in grade eight.
NCLP schools encourage children who may have lost a few years due to late enrolment to recover the lost ground and then join regular schools in grades appropriate to their age. For instance, a 12 year old will enter school at grade six and a 14 year old at grade eight. This completes their mainstreaming and ensures that no child ‘feels odd’ for being ‘over age’, says NCLP project director in Dharmapuri, N Saravanan.
UNICEF Tamil Nadu State Representative Tim Schaffter says, ‘NCLP is totally committed to the cause of helping child labourers by ensuring all of them go to school. We are also very happy to support this effort.’
There are 19 NCLP schools operating in Dharmapuri, one of the most backward and least literate districts in the state ‘ there is only 51 per cent literacy against the state average of 70 percent. Since 1996 more than 3,600 children have left their jobs, gone to school and been mainstreamed into regular schools in Tamil Nadu. All of them belong to deprived families for whom the need to earn money to survive resulted in children having to forgo an education in favour of finding a job.
Convincing Parents
The teachers perform a special role in the lives of the children in addition to teaching them. It is the teachers who persuade parents of child labourers to stop them working and send them to school instead. A teacher said, ‘Sometimes we need to counsel parents again and again before they agree to send their child to school. Almost all the parents refuse to listen to us as they fear that the income earned by the child will stop.’
To counter this fear, NCLP has started a scheme of providing a stipend of 100 rupees (‘1.80 or $1.20) per month to a child labourer who stops work and starts going to school. Mr. Saravanan said getting child labourers to enroll in schools was the most challenging aspect of their work. ‘We have a cultural education team that goes and acts out skits relating the importance of education in every village. This is followed by a visit from one our highly motivated teachers,’ he said.
I have a dream
For Kavitha, convincing her mother to let her go to school was anything but easy. She used to attend a state-run school, but her mother, unaware of the benefits of education and uneducated herself, pulled her out and instead sent her to the factory. ‘I want to study hard and become a doctor,’ she says. Her mother has relented but wants her to prove that it makes better sense to go to school rather than the factory. ‘I will prove it,’ she says with tears in her eyes and looks up to her teachers, who nod their heads in approval
Amount spent on CSR : No information regarding the amount spent on CSR was available on the homepage .
Contact details : ING Vysya Foundation Ltd
Gautam Sharma, 080 2532 8000,
Email : mailto:gautam.sharma@ingvysyalife.com?cc=info@karmayog.org
Web address :www.ingvysyabank.com/
url : www.ingvysyafoundation.com/news1.html