Hon’ble Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Shri Yogi Adityanath has unveiled HCL Foundation’s biggest corporate social responsibility project called ‘Samuday’. Samuday is a rural development initiative to create model villages, which has touched lives of around 6 lac people in the state so far.
HCL Foundation, the corporate social responsibility arm of HCL Technologies had launched Samuday in 2015. Currently the project is being implemented in three blocks of Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh. Since its launch, Samuday has impacted around six lac people in 90000 households across 720 villages through various interventions in the fields of education, agriculture, health, water, sanitation and hygiene, infrastructure and livelihood.
Speaking on the occasion, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Shri Yogi Adityanath said, “I congratulate HCL for launching ‘Samuday’ in Uttar Pradesh. It makes me proud that HCL, which started its journey from Uttar Pradesh and is now grown into a global conglomerate, has chosen Uttar Pradesh for its biggest CSR project. I am confident that the spirit with which the project is being implemented will certainly help the last man on the ground.”
Through the project, HCL Foundation is working to create a source code for sustainable and replicable blueprint for model villages. With the development of these model villages in Uttar Pradesh, the aim is to empower the people to help them make informed decisions and enhance the quality of life for themselves and their children. Towards this aim, HCL Foundation through Samuday is working with central and state government, village communities, NGO’s, knowledge institutions and allied partners.
In a little over two years, Samuday has set up over 380 information and communication technology-based classrooms and enrolled 1865 people for adult literacy programme. Samuday has also engaged 5000 farmers under various interventions and has constructed 5500 toilets, which are currently under usage. In addition, 49 mini solar grids are being set up across 63 villages. There has been a marked improvement in the nutrition intake of the village communities through the concept of Nutrition Garden in every third household of the village. Through this more than 5000 farmers have been engaged under various interventions and going forward HCL envisages a vision wherein 100% marginal farmers are aware of modern and sustainable agricultural practices.
“We, at HCL Foundation, believe that positive social change can be brought by innovative and creative models of development. Our proximity to the place from where we started our journey makes Uttar Pradesh the right fit for the project to begin. This project is not about driving changes in the rural sector as an external partner but taking communities with us in this transformational journey. We feel that through the Samuday model, we will be able to develop a blueprint that is sustainable, scalable and replicable throughout the world,” said Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Chief Executive Officer, HCL Corporation and Chairperson of the CSR Committee for the HCL Technologies Board.
