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    CSR shouldn't be used as a tool to sell more to people: Venkatesh Kini, President, Coca-Cola India.

    Synopsis

    Many of the causes Coca-Cola picks up in India as part of its corporate social responsibility have a backward linkage to a slew of its brands.

    ET Bureau
    Until last year, K Geetha Rani’s sprawling 30-acre mango orchard in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district largely wore a deserted look. As a mango farmer, she could cultivate only six acres as water was scarce. “I heard there was a new technique of mango farming and visited a model farm created by Project Unnati to see it,” she says.

    Project Unnati is a collaborative effort of Coca-Cola with Jain Irrigation to build a sustainable supply chain for Coke’s mango beverage, Maaza. The program offers financial support and imparts training on Ultra High Density Plantation, a modern farming technique.

    Rani eventually took training on drip irrigation and learnt about rainwater harvesting from the Project Unnati team, and is now expecting to double the number of mangoes produced per acre. “Earlier, I used to use fertilisers very randomly but now I use my drip to give the right fertilisers… with their support, we planted 6 acres under Project Unnati and after learning and seeing the results, we were so confident that we planted 9 acres on our own,” she elaborates.

    Cut to the 25-year-old Vivek Singhla from a town near Gurgaon. Despite a hearing impairment, Singhla pursued a course in welding from an ITI in the hope of finding employment but was unsuccessful. Subsequently, he got to know about the VEER campaign and enrolled in its program, which taught him packaging apart from spoken English, financial literacy, personality development and life skills.

    The ‘Thums Up-Being Human VEER’ campaign shares its core philosophy with Coke’s Thums Up which has a tagline: Toofan sabke andar hota hai, sirf dhakkan hatane ki der hai (Everyone has potential, we just need to unleash it). “Through this campaign, we want to give the differently-abled people across India a voice and an opportunity to fulfill their own ambition to the best of their ability,” says Venkatesh Kini, President, Coca-Cola India. As for Singhla, he’s thrilled to bits about his first job as an associate in Henkel’s packaging department

    Many of the causes Coca-Cola picks up in India as part of its corporate social responsibility have a backward linkage to a slew of its brands. “CSR should not be used as a tool to sell more to people,” says Kini, who believes that because a brand stands for certain values it has a philosophy about its role in the lives of people. The activities of the brand strengthen the perception in consumer’s mind. “That is a more sustainable, long-term way of integrating CSR into a brand.”

     
    Coca-Cola’s CSR programmes are focused around three Ws: water, women’s empowerment and well-being. Water usage reduction is a key thrust and today the company uses two liters of water to produce a liter of beverage, a 40% reduction over the last seven years.

    In addition, 130% water is being replenished either through rainwater harvesting or water conservation. Through its Anandana Foundation, Coca-Cola has so far set up about 60 check dams in arid zones countrywide.

    Second, the company chose women’s empowerment as a focus area in line with its global CSR credo of ‘5by20’, or empowering 5 million women by 2020 worldwide. “A lot of our products get consumed at home where women are the decision-makers,” says Kini. For instance, the company has deployed 1,500 solar coolers in retail outlets run by women, thereby empowering them to earn a livelihood. Simultaneously, two ongoing programs— ‘Parivartan’ and ‘Pragati’—train retailers, including women, on the basics of retailing, such as cash management, energy management, display, negotiation and customer relations.

    On the well-being front, Coke promotes sport at the grassroots, mainly football. Apart from sponsoring the Under-15 football tournament in India, it is now working with the AIFF to the build-up of the Under-17 World Cup that is scheduled to be held in the country in 2017. Coke has also come up with its ‘Support My School’ initiative, which also very neatly ties up the three Ws. Apart from providing drinking water and sanitation in schools, Coke curates playgrounds and provides toilets for girls so that they stay in schools. The company has set up an advisory board on sustainability apart from a separate board for the Anandana Foundation, which it fully funds. The seven-member advisory committee is entrusted with the work of keeping tabs on water, environment, women’s empowerment and community programs, and every quarterly board meeting ends with recommendations. Before the board meets, all data on environmental practices are shared by the company at least 15 days in advance so that members can take informed decisions.

    The company says it will continue to focus on its core areas. “By focusing, we’re able to make a bigger impact in a few areas than a smaller impact in many areas,” sums up Kini.
    ( Originally published on Dec 05, 2014 )
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