NEW DELHI: NASSCOM Foundation today, hosted India’s largest IT-BPM industry specific CSR Conference – The CSR Leadership Conference (CLC) 2018 in New Delhi at The Eros Hotel, Nehru Place.

The event brought over 300 CXOs and CSR Heads of the top most companies from across the industry, NGO Leads from all over India, Government officials, Tech4Good champions, social innovators under one roof to encourage the use of new-age technologies to solve the social development issues at the grassroots.

Shrikant Sinha, CEO, NASSCOM Foundation said, “With Rupees 4.0 technologies today we are threshold of what could be history in making. Human Centred Innovation aims to engineer and use new technologies such as AI, ML, Blockchains, Robotics etc, so as to address various day-to-day problems and needs of common people while helping in improving the social fabric too ”. This conference aims at the discussing opportunities and challenges of these technologies apart from addressing the present implementation needs.”

NASSCOM Foundation took this as an opportunity to talk about the impact created through its various interventions this year. Some of the key pointers below:

1,20,000+ youth trained on employability enhancement skills
Empowered 370 NGOs with software donations worth INR 16.1 Crores
3,400+ Persons with Disability skilled
30,000+ People Trained on Digital Literacy
Celebrated the 10th year of NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum, with a record 1900+ applications, INR 40 Lakh in grants & mentorship support to the winners
Engaged with 10,000+ active volunteers helping the Govt. & over 200 NGOs
Working towards Repositioning 220+ Public Libraries across 24 States
Sensitized 123,000+ people on e-waste across 10 cities – A report on ‘Awareness Program on Environmental Hazards of E-Waste’ was also released at the conference further highlighting the work and giving insights on how through basic sensitization, the problem of e-waste can be kept in check.

Industry leaders including Kris Gopalakrishnan,Co-founder, Infosys and Chairman, Axilor Ventures, and Raman Roy, Chairman NASSCOM, Dr. Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman, 5F World, Arvind Gupta, CEO, MyGov and Pavan Duggal, President, CyberLaws.Net shared their views on howtechnology could create a sustained and scalable impact.

The Conference also provided a 360 degree viewpoint on how digital transformation is crucial to India achieving the Sustainable Development Goals with eminent speakers like Ramanan Ramanathan, Atal Innovation Mission providing the government perspective; Moutushi Sengupta, India Head, MacAurthur Foundation sharingthe civil society experience; Leonardo Ortiz Villacorta, Director, Global Field Empowerment, Microsoft Philanthropies, providing a global outlook, Harsh Vinayak, Senior Vice President, NTT DATA sharing industry knowledge and Annurag Batra, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWorld providingthe cross sectoral insights.

The CLC further focused on how technology could be used to create impact across social development challenges like Gender Equality – Hosted by Change Alliance, environment, healthcare and Community Development in the form of panel discussions. Some examples of the already successful social technology interventions were also shared through impact talks.

While on one hand, the conference talked about new ways of encouraging children for using technology like Tinkering Labs and Makerspaces, on the other, it made sure that the sensitive topic of child protection online was also addressed with UNICEF taking the lead.

The CSR Leadership Conference did not just limit itself to discussing new technologies for social good, but went a step further by helping CSR Leads to resolve all monitoring, reporting, impact measurement and management issues with a Masterclass hosted by Goodera.

It also helped the delegates formulate better, more efficient and innovative project management strategies using Design Thinking concepts through a masterclass conducted by BBC Media Action (India) Limited.

The NGOs are often found struggling to use basic web and mobile based platforms to showcase their good work and create new channels for donations and other forms of volunteerism. Social Samosa shared their digital marketing expertise to help these NGOs use this tool to tell their stories and make it their primary means of communication with the outside world.

The CSR Leadership Conference also had on showcase, tech based social innovations from Haqdarshak, StrataEnviro Pvt. Ltd, Danamojo, Barefoot College and Eko Financial and provided CSR leads an interface with some of the leading NGOs working in the more sought after areas of Skills – Centum Foundation, Education and Livelihood – Nirmaan Organization, Persons with Disabilities – V Shesh and Road safety – WRI– Haryana Vision Zero.