HCL Foundation Extends Its Community Development Efforts in West Bengal; Signs MoU with Child in Need Institute and supports 1,150 households affected by the cyclone ‘Yaas’

Kolkata: HCL Foundation today announced that it is extending its community development efforts in West Bengal through a collaboration with Child in Need Institute (CINI). As part of this initiative, HCL Samuday – an ambitious project of HCL Foundation working towards creating a scalable and replicable development model for rural India, will partner with CINI, a national humanitarian organization working towards sustainable development in health, nutrition and education of children and women. Together, HCL Samuday and CINI will co-create solutions and bring holistic developmental changes in the state of West Bengal.

Over the past six years, HCL Samuday has created a model of integrated and sustainable village development focused on six core areas – Agriculture, Education, Health, Environment, Livelihood, and WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene). It works with local communities to identify problems, co-create solutions, and then implement them with professional support, thereby, lending the dimension of sustainability and ownership to the overall development agenda. HCL Samuday currently works in eleven blocks of Hardoi district in Uttar Pradesh and has delivered a visible, measurable impact on improving the standard of life and livelihood opportunities for over 9 lakh people in the 1299 villages where it operates.

As next steps, HCL Samuday will bring its unique interventions and learnings in the areas of Health, Education and WASH and partner with CINI to create an implementation model in the Kultali block of 24 South Parganas district in West Bengal. HCL Samuday and CINI will design interventions such as (not limited to) telehealth, adult and child education initiatives and improving hygiene standards, to begin with and subsequently expand these to include other interventions.

Commenting on the development, Alok Varma, Project Director of HCL Foundation, said: “HCL Samuday has already established a unique model for integrated and sustainable rural development reaching out to over 9 lakh people across 11 blocks in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh. We are now looking to extend this model to other states in India in a phased manner. HCL Samuday is unique and highly successful as it works with local communities to co-create solutions that truly matter. We are also excited that CINI is our first partner as we implement our plans of outreach. Their team has been doing credible work in the areas of health, education and WASH in West Bengal and we are confident that together we will be able to drive accelerated impact to help improve people’s lives in the state.”

Dr. Indrani Bhattacharya, Chief Executive Officer, CINI said, “We are happy to partner with HCL Foundation on its flagship initiative HCL Samuday to cater to the vulnerable population of West Bengal. We share a common vision to facilitate and support the people who are facing difficulties in areas of health, nutrition, education, and child protection, with adolescents as a cross-cutting issue. This partnership can lay the foundation for overall community development by bringing together humanitarian ideas to create solutions and supporting mechanism that includes technological solutions for an extensive reach and greater impact.”

As the first and immediate action, HCL Samuday will work in the Kultali block to provide immediate relief and financial support to 1,150 households affected by the highly destructive cyclone- ‘Yaas’. The cyclone affected around 10 million people in West Bengal, of which Kultali, with a population of 2.3 lakh, was among the worst affected blocks. Through this initiative, HCL Foundation will support families till the end of this year with:

• Dry ration and wellness kits: including ration, hygiene items like reusable face masks and sanitary napkins, and water purification material among others
• Educational and creative learning kits for children –  to enable children to continue studying and focus on craft activities to avoid stress
• Repair 40 drinking sources, and clean and fill 20 ponds – to tackle the scarcity of drinking water as the cyclone left the sweet water ponds & wells overflown with saline water and damaged the deep tube wells