Prudential UK's Corporate Social Responsibility:  700 Female BPO Executives Attend Seminars

By Pratap Sharma in Chandigarh

There are very few companies that take their social corporate responsibility seriously. UK based insurance company Prudential, definitely is one of them and the beneficiary of their CSR (Corporate Social responsibility) activity has been BPOs across the country.

It has come to the exclusive knowledge of Techgoss that the company has conducted many seminars, in collaboration with their Indian partner 'ICICI Prudential' across the country to educate female employees of the importance of 'Money Management'. However, the criteria for BPO selection was that they had to be serving only domestic clients.

The beneficiary BPOs across the country have been Serwizsol branches in Chandigarh and Hyderabad, Adventity from Thane and Sparsh from Mumbai among others. According to the HR manager of one of the BPO where the meeting was held, the reaction of the females was overwhelming. This is because women in most cases were totally unaware of the importance of savings and money management in their lives. Most of these women, we learnt, dependent first on their fathers before their marriage and later on their husbands. This is a very sad state of affair in a country where the equality of women have been stressed by government messages for some time now and yet women are still under the shackles of their circumstances. The condition seems not to be very different for educated female employees of BPOs in India.

The knowledge and training given to the girls included topics like best tips and tricks to manage ones money, inflation and how to beat inflation, how to take advantage of the mutual fund boom, what are the various savings schemes like PPF and how they can be used for short and long term financial planning etc.

It was learnt that the HR of the concerned BPOs were sceptical initially when Prudential UK approached them. And though the seminars were planned for at least two hours, the trainers were given only an hour to begin with. However, there were many instances where after one round of seminar in the BPO was over, they had to hold more rounds for those left out as word spread regarding the benefit of the training.

However, Prudential UK and ICICI Prudential, are keeping the project away from the media glare since it falls under Corporate Social responsibility. So far around 700 women have been trained and Prudential UK is expected to make an announcement of their activity to the press about these activities only after they have trained at least a thousand female employees of BPOs across the country.

It is heartening to know that while employees of BPOs across the country do so much for the nation, there's not enough care that is taken of them, apart from the mandatory ones like pick and drop facility, food etc. Such activities from the financial world to reach out to BPO employees is not only laudatory, but welcome at the same time.