Corporate Sustainability

The guiding principle in TIS’s Corporate Sustainability initiatives has been to leverage its capabilities, extend the work done in the past, and capitalize on its key assets, viz., knowledge, skills and core competencies – not just time and/or money. Based on this principle, TIS has steadily widened the ambit of its LD initiatives, each year building upon the gains of the past.

In the initial stages, TIS’s primary focus was to help the LD Clinic at the Sion Hospital in Mumbai get back on its feet by providing funding for salaries, stationery, and other basic necessities. As these needs were fulfilled and the operations stabilized, TIS moved on a broader and deeper engagement with the Clinic that has progressively grown from year to year—with the development of a patient management software system; the creation of a fun-filled, visually rich book called Brain Teasers that was distributed free of cost at the Clinic; and the immensely successful global forum on LD, the Tata Interactive Learning Disability Forum (TLDF), among others.

The TLDF 2006 was the first of its kind in India, where international LD experts from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, International Dyslexia Association (IDA) and nasen shared their insights. While the TLDF 2006 focused on increasing awareness of LD, the 2007 event underpinned the need for multidisciplinary activities, individual contributions and voluntary actions.

Over the years, TIS has been working on multiple levels: financial, clinical, curricular, local and regional. As depicted in the figure, TIS’s LD activities center around creating leverage points for each progressive step: starting with people, to the creation of software, the development of books, then events and now, material for schools and changes in syllabi.

Team TIS have been regular participants at the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon to spread LD awareness in Mumbai. TIS is also actively supporting First Book, in the US and soon also Europe, to provide children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books. To improve the efficiencies of their book distribution, TIS has partnered with them to develop a portal so that the process becomes more efficient and optimized. TIS is the only organization involved in the development of the portal, which it has adopted as another CSR activity. Additional funding for the project will be provided by some of the other Tata Group companies.