For the last three years now, Canon India has been making steady progress with its ‘Adopt a village’ CSR initiative. Starting in 2012, the initiative has seen the Japanese company adopt three villages from across the country so far.
“We plan to adopt another village close to Kolkata and take the total number of villages adopted to four by the end of this year,” Kazutada Kobatashi, president and chief executive officer (CEO), Canon India said.
In the adopted villages, Canon focus on what it likes to call the ‘3E’s’—education, environment and eye care.“Across the globe, we follow the Kyosei philosophy when it comes to CSR,” Kobatashi said.
The Kyosei is a philosophy of living and working together regardless of differences in religion, culture and race.Canon India while declining to comment on the amount it has invested said its CSR spending was in line with the regulations laid down by the government.
In the field of education, tangible benefits are starting to show in the places where Canon India has been involved for some time. In Ferozepur Namak, the village adopted by Canon India in Haryana, the number of female students went up from 192 in 2013 to 250 in 2014 in the village primary school.
“One of our targets is to bring more girls into the schools,” Kobatashi said.“In eye care, we install the retinal camera and help prevent and protect the villagers of the adopted villages from eye diseases,” Kobatashi said. “We have checked over 8,000 patients in Haryana in two years and I am expecting the same number in Maharaja Katte in Karnataka.”
The way we go about providing eye care is that we have a vision centre and most of the equipment there is provided by Canon. We provide a technician who can man the equipment and sometimes a doctor who decides what needs to be done.
To take its village adoption drive forward, the company is collaborating with the NGO, Charities Aid Foundation (CAF).
A part of the plan at Canon is to provide soft skill and other technical training to the villagers to enable them to find meaningful jobs.
This article was taken from here.