MUMBAI/NEW DELHI (India CSR): Bandhan Konnagar hosted the first-ever SETU – India’s National Leadership Summit on Collaborative Social Development today, with the theme ‘From Policy to Practice: Building Partnerships for Scalable Social Impact’, to discuss the theme with policy makers, government officials, corporate CSR and ESG practitioners, philanthropists, academicians and experts from the development sector. The Summit aimed to establish a national forum for discussion and action on the opportunities and challenges of integrating development goals across government, business, civil society, communities and other stakeholders and into scalable, measurable and sustainable solutions. The Summit was organised at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, and was an important milestone in the development of a national dialogue for inclusive and collaborative social development that will be continued in the future.
Kamlesh Paswan, Hon’ble Minister of State, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, was invited to the inaugural Summit, which brought together senior government representatives, including Shri Arun Kr Pillai, CEO, National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC); Shri Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, Chairman, Bandhan Group; and Shri Sanjib Kumar Das, CEO, Bandhan Konnagar, along with CSR and ESG leaders, development practitioners, philanthropies, academicians and implementation partners.
SETU is an ongoing dialogue on collaborative social development at national level. The Summit aims to foster greater linkages among policy, resources, implementation and community needs and will highlight these through cross-sector discussions, exchange of grassroots experience, evidence-based impact studies, partnership announcements and recognition of organisations contributing to inclusive development. Through the synergy of government, corporations, civil society, philanthropy, academia and communities, SETU seeks to promote solutions that can shift from policy to practice, pilot to scale, intervention to impact and measurable. With this, it aims to play a part in a development paradigm in which economic development and social development go hand in hand and be a part of India’s growth.
Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, Chairman, Bandhan Group, said, “India’s vision of achieving a developed country status by 2047 will be fulfilled with a purpose only when the fruits of development are realized for all the sections of society. Rural communities, women, youth and under-served communities can’t just be passive beneficiaries of development; they must be the active participants and contributors to economic and social change in India. The next step in CSR is to go beyond expenditure and activity to measurable long-term impact. SETU is a call to move from welfare to empowerment, from isolated interventions to partnerships and from short-term activities to enduring social value.”
The first session was inaugurated by Shrimati Kamlesh Paswan and Shrimati Arun Kumar Pillai, providing the background to the significance of policy, skilling and institutional partnership in inclusive development. Shri Chandra Shekhar Ghosh gave a leadership talk titled “From Inclusion to Institution: Building Development Models from the Grassroots” highlighting the importance of developing models that are more than individual interventions that can become sustainable institutions and systems. The Summit also saw the discussion around the structural issues in skill development, sustainable livelihoods and enterprise, credit and markets, community-led climate action, and the importance of health and education in inclusive human development.
Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee gave a keynote on the journey of CSR from compliance to collaborative & measurable impact and Ms. Shefali Agarwal, CGM, NABARD spoke on Graduated Rural Income Generation Programme (GRIP) and innovative means of enabling rural ultra poor families. The programme was also marked through the impact study along with a partnership announcement between Bandhan Konnagar and LEAP 300, experience sharing by livelihood beneficiaries and recognition of Bandhan Konnagar’s CSR partners by the SETU Bandhan CSR Awards.
Sanjib Kumar Das, CEO, Bandhan Konnagar, said, “For us, SETU is the next step in the development of Bandhan Konnagar’s 25-year-long journey and we feel that it will be the key between thoughts and deeds. We hope to foster partnerships that are outcome-focused, scalable and responsive to the reality on the ground, which is defined by the coming together of communities, implementation organisations, government, corporates, donors and knowledge institutions around a shared purpose to strengthen an ecosystem in which education, skilling, livelihoods, financial inclusion and climate resilience can converge to create greater opportunities for communities, and help build a more equitable and future-ready India.”
Bandhan Konnagar, an NGO, initiated its activities in 2001 with two main goals: Poverty alleviation and Women’s empowerment which were the driving force behind organising the Summit. With a long-standing belief that social transformation is impossible with just one intervention, Bandhan Konnagar was conceptualised as an extension of this belief. Bandhan Konnagar, now with 25 years of grassroots engagement, was conceived as an extension of their long-held belief that sustainable social transformation can only be achieved through a series of interventions. The organisation sees the need for the next steps toward development in the form of enhanced partnerships, increased attention to measurable results, institutional development and solutions that help communities break free from welfare and dependency and transition to dignity, opportunity and economic self-reliance. Hence, the Summit aimed to convene multiple stakeholders to discuss evidence, experiences and models that can be transferred, enriched and scaled up to the national level in India.
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