The ‘TCCI – TQMS -- Group-HR -- TMTC Community’ organised a workout at the TMTC, Pune on June 28 - 29, 2002 to assist 19 Tata companies and their 30 facilitators to converge on a common system for social and environmental reporting.

B G Deshmukh, director, Tata Sons, as chairman, TCCI in his welcome address complimented Tata companies for their substantial contribution to the Group environment report and for the excellent work done by most Tata companies on last year’s action plan on corporate sustainability.

Dr J J Irani, director, Tata Sons, as a member on the international board of global reporting initiatives encouraged the participants to focus on producing concrete results while continuing to learn from these new experiments. Dr Irani also emphasised on the power of volunteering.

Satish Pradhan, executive vice president, group HR, as a major player in this community, helped participants to build perspectives on corporate social responsibility and derive models for responsible action at a collective and company level and more importantly at the employee and individual levels.

Jehangir Ardeshir, CEO, TQMS, as another important player of the community, highlighted how the Tatas are always known for responsible business and reaffirmed that the TBEM shows high degrees of correlation with the Tata corporate social responsibility model.

Tata Steel presented the Group’s first corporate sustainability report that serves as a benchmark and a confidence-builder for other Tata companies.

Starting with Workout 2002, the Tatas and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have begun work on exploring the possibility of applying the techniques of the UNDP Human Development Index to bring out what is bound to be the world’s first corporate index for human development. Speaking on this occasion, Dr K Seeta Prabhu, head - Human Development Resource Centre, UNDP - India with her colleagues made presentations on the concept of the human development index. Suraj Kumar, programme officer - HDRC, UNDP - India made a presentation on measuring human development.

M K Nagabhushan, senior consultant, TQMS and Anant G Nadkarni, general manager - TCCI made presentations on the TBEM model and management of concerns on social responsibility.

The workout concluded with the formation of a group resource under the TCCI on corporate sustainability and a strategy to assist other Tata companies on corporate social responsibility as also unanimously endorsed at the TCCI council meeting held recently at Bombay House. This strategy will be deployed taking companies in groups covering broadly the next 2 years. The group resource on corporate sustainability would be working on developing a Tata model using technical inputs from the UNDP and others for this purpose.