Corporate Citizenship
Bangalore, a home to innumerable huge corporate companies, MNCs.
Home to india's brightest companies Infosys, Wipro, Biocon.
Anyone would think, that it will be very well maintained and looked after by these companies.
But, I made a mistake, not all companies can be Tata Steel, not all companies can take social responsibilities, not all companies feel to keep their neighbourhood clean and healthy.
With increasing competition, companies only feel to grow their bottomline.
Some people want to make some difference, but dont have the capacity to change the situation single handedly. Some only like to fight with their governments. Some only like to complain about the sorry state of affairs to the numerous news channels.
But for people who want to argue with me about how can a city be maintained by a single company, or why should companies take responsibility for a city.....I suggest visit Jamshedpur, aka JSR.

JSR, home to the Tatas, companies like Tata Steel, Tata Motors, TIMKEN, Tata Tubes etc. All have their head quarters here in this steel city.
Walk down the small city, you will believe what corporate citizenship is all about.
Everything from Water to Electricity is maintained by Tata Steel. Yes, not by local govt.
All the cleaners that you will find cleaning the streets to make it look that much cleaner is from Tata Steel. The zoo you visit is maintained effectively by all Tata companies.
The Jubilee park, a wonderful place to visit, and is a tourist spot is totally maintained by Tata Steel.
I loved walking through the roads on which Rusy Modi centre for excellence (Tata Steel Auditorium) and XLRI are on one side and Jubilee Park on the other. So fresh is the air there, you would fall in love. The Rusy Modi CoE is an architectural treat. I visited it for one seminar for Tata Steel.
Now if you visit the Tata Steel factory floors. You will be amazed at the cleanliness that has been maintained, even when it is a steel factory.
The first thing that you will notice is the notice board which says "WILL FOR WORK".
Indeed, the people there, have a passion for what they do.
They dont crib when they do night shifts, fully charged up they deliver according to their targets.
Yes that is another facet that I loved, each and every shop floor have a score card with the targets for the day, also mentioning the targets that have alrady been achieved. Tata Steel generally have a target of production at the beginning of every quarter, and every day that target score card is updated. So you would feel where it is standing on a particular day.
A great motivating tool.
Safety, is one thing that Tata Steel was lacking few years before. When I was working as a trainee there, it was their biggest concern, as lot of their employees got injured while on job. They took it very seriously and formed a committee, whose sole purpose was to look into the safety of the employees.
Security another aspect, which is taken into seriously. Even though they could have outsourced it to any third party security companies like "group-4", or "TOP" etc, they have their own security people, systems. Most of them are ex-army people.
What lesson that these big corporates of B'lore can learn from Tata Steel is that it does not matter whether its your core area or not, whether it will give you high returns or not, whether it will give you awards or not, work for the city where you belong, take up some social responsibility yourself. Not only donate dollars to NGOs and make news.
Try to contribute in your own way to make the people around you happier, not only to your employees. This is the only reason, Tatas have created such a brand in the minds of people.
It has taken 100 years to create Tata Steel (2007 Tata Steel is celebrating its 100th B'Day).
But the urge and passion to contribute to society, what has made TataSteel, such a corporate citizen.

Lot of things need to be learned from this wonderful company set in such a beutiful city, JSR.
I was just a jr-trainee there, but I am really proud of being associated with a company of such stature.
I salute the Tatas.