With a focus to create and preserve sustainable livelihoods, L&T Financial Services (LTFS) designs its CSR programme around one of the key hygiene factors i.e, Water. Water being a crucial enabler that facilitates livelihood, we acknowledge the need to understand its availability, management and deployment. Realising and believing that the heart of our interventions is the rural regions and farmer is our prime beneficiary, we channelizes our CSR efforts to bring in changes by addressing farmer’s key challenges in Water. A large proportion of population in India depends on nature based agriculture and the recent climate variability trends create an alarming situation for them. While the Rural farming communities strive hard to balance between drought and flood like conditions which directly attack their wellbeing, security and income, we lends a helping hand to augment their perceptions on Water.   

Our Integrated Water Resource management (IWRM) programme brings in opportunities to vulnerable communities to regenerate the degraded watershed they live in. It brings forth challenges in soil and Water conservation to the forefront and designs innovative and sustainable solutions to address them. It is extremely critical to bring in a balance between consumption and regeneration of existing sources of Water especially in Arid and Semi-arid regions. The programme adopts measures which optimises resource consumption and showcases potential of simple yet powerful practices.  

 Initiatives undertaken in the space of Water so far:

A watershed model was initiated by L&T Financial Services (LTFS) across 13 villages of Marathwada, the severe-drought affected region of Maharashtra to facilitate land and Water resource management for sustainable production. The project created and enhanced livelihood opportunities to farmers from the region by laying special emphasis on protective irrigation in order to improve crop productivity. We have so far constructed 65 Dohas (Water harvesting structures) across Marathwada through the programme. The project covers 23.10 kilometres of Water stream and developed water storage capacity of 3,91,197 CUM. 

L&T Financial Services is currently designing a platform for communities especially women to educate themselves and imbibe nuances of financial literacy leading to enhanced absorption of facilities and schemes granted by the Government and other financial institutions. Such a step towards automation helps Rural India to adopt schemes especially Micro-credit with the end objective of nurturing a digital India. 

LTFS is currently preparing to launch its Digital Sakhi program which is a unique financial inclusion initiative aiming towards inclusion of rural women in digital payments space by strengthening their capacities in areas of digital financial literacy, sustainable livelihoods & enterprise development opportunities.

We aim to touch 1.5 lakh rural individuals through a cadre of 200 ‘Digital Sakhis’, who are rural women enabled and empowered with knowledge and skills to create a conducive environment for rural geographies to move towards a digital economy. This programme will be implemented in states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh in FY 18.

Digital Sakhi

L&T Financial Services launched 'Digital Sakhi’' a digital financial inclusion programme for rural women in Maharashtra in partnership with Action for Agricultural Renewal in Maharashtra (AFARM), on June 29, 2017 in Pune. The launch event was graced by the Divisional Commissioner, Mr. Chandrakant Dalvi.

‘Digital Sakhi’ is a rural woman between 25-35 years of age, with a digital device in hand, equipped with skills and knowledge to confidently impart digital financial literacy training to women from the villages. The program will develop a team of 100 ‘Digital Sakhis’ as digital enablers, who in turn will impart training to 1,000 women entrepreneurs to conduct daily transactions using digital modes of payments.

She will also conduct camps in villages with the aim of sensitizing close to 1,00,000 villagers on various government initiatives and programmes on digitization and moving towards a less-cash economy.

The Digital Sakhi programme will be run on a pilot basis in 32 villages of Pune, Solapur and Osmanabad districts of Maharashtra in partnership with Action for Agricultural Renewal in Maharashtra (AFARM), an NGO engaged in rural livelihoods promotion, enterprise development of socially and economically marginalized rural communities.

The programme will build capacities of rural women on digital modes of payments; enhance their economic capabilities through entrepreneurship development and enable up-skill interventions on market relevant community trades.

LTFS values, respects and attends to the individuals desirous of support. Engaging the key stakeholder employee into the larger structure of the organisation, LTFS believes in the potential to create incremental yet impactful changes in the lives of those in need. Through the programme Boondein, employees volunteer with their heart and soul in projects and programmes specially designed to carefully bring changes in the community. The impact is both ways – as the community gets facilitated with the skills imparted, employees start to care more for the lesser privileged individuals whereby developing a caring culture in the organisation. Employees take pride and displays excellence with the confidence that they contribute to a sensitive and compassionate corporate house.

We are committed to meaningfully engage with bottom of the pyramid communities and usher in inclusive development. We commit to carefully design this through innovative solutions, development of measurable outcomes and sustainable practices embedded in the psyche of our Social Responsibility programmes. We acknowledge that in a nation’s progress, equitable contribution by every cross-section of the society is critical. By paving way for Sustainable livelihoods, LTFS empowers communities at the bottom of the pyramid to bring in change.

Water-wise and Money-wise has so far touched over 400 employees from 4 office locations at Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi as enthusiastic contributors and we continue to receive their endorsement as well as affection towards making a difference. Our volunteering efforts benefitted about 2,000 beneficiaries so far during the year.