Work update

Some people have commented that I haven't blogged much about the actual work I'm doing here, and some might question if, indeed, I really am (especially after reading the post about the day that pretty much involved driving to and from work and being sent out for lunch at Ankour).. but, yes, I am in fact doing quite a bit of work, with more to come! My reasons for not writing as much about that previously were, 1) I have to be sensitive to what my clients might want shared 'out there' , 2) the work is interesting, but the people, events and sights are more different than the work , 3) I'm out of excuses, so I guess I'll write something about the work now...

I mentioned I'm at the Bombay Chamber, and they are looking to 'brand' a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program for their member organizations. Specifically, they have a lot of large companies (we've met with many key Executives at those already) who are doing a lot with CSR, (not quite on the scale that IBM is doing by sending us here for 1 month away from our normal assignments, but still significant efforts), but their medium/ small business members are doing less, as they don't see how they can contribute with their limited resources. So the key is to create a CSR iniative within BCII that can leverage the collaborative knowledge and resources of their member organizations. It must be scaleable for the smaller companies (they won't be sending anyone for a month to another country to do CSR work- but maybe they can spare someone for a few hours a month). It has to be about more than just donating money, which has typcially been India's view of philanthropy- now the shift is to time/ resource skills donation as well. The Chamber's president has determined that Healthcare and Education within Mumbai should be our focal areas.
In a nutshell, that's what Cecilia and I are working on. It is mostly research based, so we've been reading a lot of materials from various sources such as WHO, USAID, local state and city government, websites of other chambers internationally, and we've been having a lot of meetings with various stakeholders and people who have expertise in Health and Education. For example, last night (just before going into the Bollywood move- which was a lot of fun, btw), I got an urgent message from my client, to contact her. I did, and it turns out that the Director General of the Chamber had organized a meeting for me this afternoon with Mr. Jairaj Phatak, Municipal Commissioner of BMC. So off we went to a very cool looking government building across from Victoria terminal (VT- train station) to the meeting. I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside, but we didn't know that yet when I snapped a quick one (with my client's help as my lookout), inside the conference room in which we were waiting...
It was an interesting meeting, and is pretty cool that I got to meet with an important local government officer.
We also had some really interesting meetings earlier this week- including a visit to the Dharaveli slum hospital (as in Slumdog Mill. movie), it was surprisingly empty (at least where we were). we met with a wamn who started SNEHA, an organization set up to help women and children, from a holistic point of view (rather than stop-gap measures for certain issues such as reproductive health, pre-natal care, immunizations, etc. And meetings with various other Execs on the Chamber's CSR committee, as well as attending an HR committee meeting at the Chamber (very interesting, speaker is also a municipal commission, I believe). The speech he gave really highlighted how different things are here in terms of employment law. He was reminding everyone that they need to provide proper facilities for their employees (toilets, lighting, ventilation) and that their are certain working hours and lower age limits for workers. Of course these things are very important, but it was clear from the delivery tone and responses, that these regulations are not really in place at this point in time. At all!
Too bad I didn't get to do the HR work with them... oh well!

I will post pictures of the building shortly, for now, I need to get my 'beauty rest'.. b/c tomorrow, I might become famous....

(see next blog post for the end of this cliffhanger ;)