International Day of Rural Women 2024: Enhancing lives and livelihoods

Women in rural India are crucial to the agricultural sector, for food security and rural economies. However, despite their many contributions, such as managing farms, caring for livestock, or other ways of contributing to household income, they often face significant challenges in access to education, healthcare, financial resources and technology.

UltraTech Cement Limited constantly works towards enhancing the lives of people around its business locations. A key focus of such endeavours are rural women, as UltraTech celebrates their strengths, resilience and contribution to communities across India. UltraTech's commitment to social welfare and women's economic empowerment is in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, encouraging CSR teams to work to empower socio-economically marginalized women and promote gender equality where they operate.

UltraTech engages with these women through initiatives like microenterprise formation, tailoring, embroidery and other vocational training, coaching and creating infrastructure for education, and support for health, wellness, and nutrition, amongst others. Along with these, UltraTech’s social impact projects focus on preparing youth for newer economy jobs through vocational skills training and providing vulnerable people in local communities with access to sustainable livelihood opportunities. Some of these programmes and initiatives are mentioned below.

One of these key social impact projects was vocational training and placement of over 95 socio-economically marginalised young women facilitated by Baikunth Cement Works, UltraTech’s integrated cement manufacturing unit located in Chhattisgarh, which helped the women to be economically independent. The unit partnered with one of India’s largest apparel manufacturers and exporters of readymade garments, Shahi Exports to train the women in industrial sewing machine operations so as to enable them secure sustainable livelihoods. Of these women, many found employment in the manufacturing units of Shahi exports, or became self-employed.
 

Similarly, Baga Cement Works, UltraTech’s integrated cement manufacturing unit located in Himachal, held meetings at the village level to understand the challenges faced by women and the support they require. After a series of meetings with the community, Ultratech developed a solution to help families generate income at the village level and overcome this problem, and helped organise the creation of a women-led milk collection unit, as well as a milk processing unit. This helped increase household incomes and also reduce wastage of products such as previously surplus milk that could not be sold in time. Seven days of training was also given by an expert to make milk by-products like paneer, ghee, and curd. Machines were also provided to this women's group to aid their activities, ranging from a paneer making machine, to a milk analyser and even a Deep Freezer.

Kotputli Cement Works, another of UltraTech’s integrated cement manufacturing units, meanwhile has embarked on providing coaching classes for girls from marginalised communities. After the CSR team noticed low rates of passing in the 10^th class public examination, they decided to start providing free coaching to these girls. The team also provided free transport facilities for the girls to help them travel to-and-fro from their villages. Three professional teachers were also hired by the team to coach the girls in Mathematics, English and Science at the premises of Aditya Birla Public School.