"The grant covers more than 600,000 people across the country. It was a year of thrill setting up the institutional mechanism."
HCL Grant, a corporate social responsibility project of HCL Technologies, is trying to contribute to rural development through engagement with NGOs. In the third edition this year, the foundation will continue to invest Rs 5 crore each in three NGOs in the fields of healthcare, environment and education. Nidhi Pundhir, director CSR and head at HCL Foundation, spoke to Moneycontrol about the progress and plans for the initiative.
Edited excerpts:
How has HCL Grant panned out in the last year?Last year was a grand success in terms of reaching out to the nook and corners of the country and ensuring we have covered all 29 states and 5 Union Territories.
It’s been a great year in terms of engaging with partners at the ground level with the projects that have already been funded, in the areas of education, health and environment where we are looking at financial literacy and social inclusion.
We are also looking at in use of technology in the conservation of the common land and water and air, and at addressing anaemia in the girl child especially in adolescent girls, dietary supplements, and reduction in maternal mortality. In education, for example, we are looking at use of storytelling methods for soft skill development.
The grant covers more than 600,000 people across the country. It was a year of thrill setting up the institutional mechanism.
How has the use of technology increased at the grassroots level in the past year?If you look at our country, you will see internet being the cheapest commodity around, becoming cheaper than water in certain parts of the country. Technology is very much bringing the world together and that has been utilised by the development sector very well. In our own HCL Grant projects, we are using mapping tools to understand the nature of flora and fauna of the areas in which we are working.
We are also looking at mobile based mechanisms to be able to capture data to send out information in terms of healthcare delivery and understand needs of patients.
There is still more scope to utilise technology further in terms of management information systems, healthcare and social management information system. We are at it and will develop it further.
What is the grant corpus this year?It will be a Rs 15 crore commitment- Rs 5 crore for each for each NGO which is selected by the jury on March 9. Plus we also spend top up funds to build capacity of NGOs and to be able to roll out the edition smoothly.What are the broad themes that will be funded by HCL Grant this year?
The main themes are education, health and environment. We have kept it quite broad. In education we cover early childhood education to elementary to secondary and then the higher education. We are looking at an inclusive mechanism so as education reaches women and children. We look at it as human resource development and we don’t see it as reading writing or arithmetic.
Employable education is what we aim at and use of technology in education. Inclusion is big, in order to include people living with different kind of disability and gender component, also the socially excluded communities.
In health, we look at universal coverage and universal health for all. We have models where we converge with government to have health facilities available to everyone, especially mother and child health. Water and sanitation are very much part of health.
Environment is also broad based, including all forms of flora and fauna, conservation of wildlife, use of environment friendly agriculture, etc.
How many applications were received this year and what is the plan for the grant going forward?We received to be precise, 3449 registrations and 800 odd completed applications in all respects. We have reached the final stage where three NGOs per area have been identified. Once we have an NGO identified per category, we sign a memorandum of understanding with them per project. HCL Foundation also engages with these NGOs and ensures that they get the support when needed.
