HCL Foundation has been actively working to bring economic and social development to rural areas through a sustainable and scalable model. In 2015, HCL Foundation launched its flagship program – HCL Samuday. In collaboration with the Central and state governments, local communities, NGOs, knowledge institutions and allied partners, today HCL Samuday is helping rural populace in identifying key challenges and overcoming them through innovative solutions. The Foundation has introduced several interventions across fields such as education, health, agriculture, livelihood and WASH (water, sanitation & hygiene) in selected villages of India.

HCL Samuday has been actively providing immense support to people living in rural hinterlands with a focus on sustainable community development. The project currently covers 164 gram-panchayats including over 90,000 households, impacting around 6 lakh people, in three blocks of Hardoi district in Uttar Pradesh – Kachhauna, Behandar and Kothawanin.

For the agriculture sector, HCL Samuday has created mobilized groups for farmers to increase their income by 25 per cent. These groups are designed to provide in-depth knowledge about scientific farming practices through training programs at every cropping stage. Soil testing with the help of Govt. labs to understand the nutrient value of the soil and calculate the input required, nursery management, integrated pest management, accounting techniques to help farmers take farming as a business, among others are some of the key training programs. HCL Samuday has also introduced novel concepts like Nutrition Garden and Bori Bagicha to help farmers save their household income.

Speaking of education, Samuday has been continuously working with a vision to ensure quality education for every child and provide them with an effective learning environment wherein they can learn and hone their existing skills. It has launched ICT-based intervention Shiksha and community mobilization-based intervention Transition to help teachers deliver better learning experiences to students. Happy School, another intervention that takes care of the availability of the necessary infrastructure and its optimal utilization for making sure that an effective learning environment exists. Later they came up with Shiksha+, an intervention which is playing a key role in eradicating illiteracy.

Under the Health vertical, Samuday’s focus is to mitigate infant mortality rate and maternal mortality rate while giving access to primary healthcare services across communities. Interventions like Nurse Mentor, Staff Nurse, Mobile Mentoring Van, among others aim to build the capacity of frontline workers. They have also organized Screening Camps followed by Nutrition Camps, which work towards solving problems of malnutrition.

Contributing to the infrastructure sector, HCL Samuday is striving to provide electricity in areas lacking access and ensures a non-disruptive supply of electricity in health centres and schools. For the same, they have set up solar mini-grids and installed roof-top solar panels. Besides, when speaking of livelihood, Samuday is working hard to ensure that all marginal households have an alternate source of income apart from their existing jobs. This is done by strengthening the existing supply chain of agri-allied income generating activities and strengthening women institutions. They have also established individual and group-based business enterprises at the local level for sustained employment and skill upgradation of youth to ensure sustained wage or self-employment.

Under WASH, Samuday aims to ensure clean villages and access to clean drinking water for everyone. They are following a Community-led Total Sanitation strategy to motivate households to build and use toilets. They have also made an Open Defecation Elimination Plan and executed in close coordination with local government officials to achieve germ-free environment across communities.

With all such initiatives, HCL Samuday is working towards bringing sustainability at the grass-roots level and achieve a pollution-free clean India. The aim is to better peoples’ present and future and eventually taking villages of India to great heights. Hopefully, this initiative will soon touch millions of lives across India and help them live a better life in the future.