CSR head of Suzlon speaks about FAO meet and efforts being made to reach out to needy people.
Seemantinee Khot is the only Indian who will be flying to UN for the international meet of Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that will be held on March 21. She has worked for 25 years for the welfare of women farmers in the country. Since the age of 16, she has travelled around the world to learn and teach about working with farmers. She speaks to Kiran Dahitule about the FAO meet and how her current job as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) head at Suzlon is helping her to reach out to needy people.
What kind of work have you been doing while working with the women of our country?
I have been working for developing and implementing comprehensive programmes, coordinating multi-stakeholder analysis and policy research, facilitating learning-orientated development programmes and their evaluations, in India and overseas.
I have worked with small and large NGOs, civil society movements, academic institutions, government departments, international donor agencies and UN organisations on a range of projects and consultancy assignments.
How will your experience help to interact with other members who are going to attend the FAO meeting?
People with varied experiences in different sectors like NGO or government are working for the food production and agriculture in various countries. FAO meet will give us a platform to share our experiences and learn from them. I will be the only person who will represent India in the meeting and that too from corporate sector. We will be discussing about various ways of reaching out to those who are way below the poverty line and need support to make them sustainable.
How does the corporate sector work with the people from the farming and cattle breeding background? What is your plan of action?
There are many things that we in the pipeline. Even after being in the corporate sector, we are not doing just a mere show of CSR.
We are working on ‘Conjunctive Land Use’ project where we have our Suzlon windmills. We will make that land available to the poor farmers to use it instead of keeping it empty and wasting the natural resources.
We are seeking permission from the authorities who own the land and we will later give permission to the farmers to utilise the land and increase the agricultural produce. There are various such projects that we would like to undertake.
Apart from making land available, we plan to train people and provide them seeds. We have trained people called ‘Jaankars’ who will provide technical help to farmers. There are about 100 ‘Jaankars’ all over India.
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