Mumbai: ITC believes that brands must serve a larger societal purpose and leverage the substantial market interventions to positively influence social change. This belief drives our efforts to build purpose-led brands. Several of ITC’s brands lead purposeful initiatives in areas that can make a meaningful difference. The ‘Mangaldeep’ brand is empanelling visually impaired persons as fragrance testers, fostering a life of dignity and hope. ‘Fiama’ espouses the cause of addressing mental health issues. ‘Vivel’ champions women’s empowerment. The ‘Savlon Swasth India’ programme which orchestrates hygiene behaviour, has covered over 8,000 schools reaching out to over 2 million students. ‘Classmate All Rounder’ programme aims at holistic skill development, covering over 3,00,000 school students. ‘YiPPee!’s Terra programme upcycles post-consumer plastic wrapper waste into attractive laptop sleeves, tote bags and so on.
ITC combines agile competitiveness with environmental sustainability and livelihood generation
Corporates have both an economic and a social purpose. Hence, the path to future progress necessitates business strategies that not only address such uncertainties but also the underlying fault-lines of social inequity and environmental threats. This realisation led ITC to embrace a paradigm of responsible competitiveness, that combines agile competitiveness with environmental sustainability and livelihood generation.
ITC continues its stellar contribution to environmental and social capital as we complete 20 years of sustainability reporting. You will draw immense pride that 12 of your company’s hotels and the data centre “ITC Sankhya” became the first in the world to be certified LEED Zero Carbon, with two hotels also receiving the LEED Zero Water distinction. ITC’s businesses and value chains today support over six million livelihoods. The footprint of your company’s CSR projects spans over 300 districts in 27 States/Union Territories and reaches out to over 7.5 million people of which nearly 5 million are women. Several more milestones in sustainability performance have been crossed, which I will detail in a subsequent section.
ITC’s two-horizon approach – strengthening current livelihoods and building capabilities for better tomorrow
Over the years, ITC has implemented an impactful Social Investments Programme to catalyse gainful livelihood opportunities for rural communities through a two-horizon approach. Horizon-1 focuses on strengthening current livelihoods of communities, primarily in agriculture and allied sectors whilst Horizon-2 builds capabilities for a better tomorrow. Interventions in areas such as primary education, vocational training, women empowerment, healthcare and others have been progressively scaled up over the years with a transformative impact on the ground. Pursuing our diversity and inclusion goals, it is heartening that many of our state-of-the-art ICMLs employ a majority of women, ranging between 50-75 per cent of the total workforce.
ITC sustained its ‘AA’ rating by MSCI-ESG for the fifth consecutive year reinforcing its leadership amongst peers. It is a matter of pride that our innovative initiatives have enabled ITC to be the only company of its size to achieve the global environmental distinction of being carbon, water and solid waste recycling positive for over 18, 21 and 16 years respectively.
In today’s context it is evident that any strategy, which is devoid of addressing the growing societal challenges will be outdated, irrelevant and bound to be short-lived. It is for this reason that ITC has made sustainable and inclusive growth the bedrock of its corporate strategy, crafting innovative business models that work towards building economic, environmental and social capital as a unified approach.
