Kshitij

Community Development initiative of SIIB - A Curtain Raiser

“He who shares the wealth generated only after serving the people, through work done as a sacrifice for them, is freed from all sins. On the contrary those who earn wealth only for themselves, eat sins that lead to frustration and failure.”

Srimad Bhagvad Gita

Everyone in SIIB is aware of the community development initiative as it is a part of our academic curriculum but really few of us know that it has an identity.

Kshitij which means Horizons, is the official name of the community development program of SIIB. The vision of SIIB states that instilling a sense of Corporate Social Responsibility in our future global leaders is an essential step in understanding the role of the corporate contributing to the society. It is not only to inculcate these values but is also a direction to the emerging managers to understand the real voyage of life. Thus, realising its importance, our director mam, Dr. Rajani Gupte enthused students to lead this change and thus Kshtij was born.

The objective of Kshitij is just not to get people only to support change but to give them responsibility for engendering change.

For this, a team comprising of the first year students of MBA-International Business, MBA-Agri Business is formed every year who works under the guidance of our indefatigable mentor, Mrs Viraja Bhat, who is the faculty in charge of the program. To further strengthen the movement, students from first year MBA-Energy and Environment has also joined hands with the team.

There are various activities undertaken right now. The brief description of the ongoing projects is as follows:

· E Evening classes - The charity begins right from our own house. The community development team realized the fact and started a project to take evening classes for the children of the support staff of SIC. The team of 9 students takes classes of 13 children comprising from various classes from 1st to 7th std. A structured curriculum has been drafted after objectively analyzing the requirements of each child. The focus is on the all round development of the kids and so apart from taking maths & English classes the team also takes classes of Communication ,GK, Computers etc.

Wakad - SIIB has adopted a local municipal school. They visit this school twice a week to teach the English and basic computer skills to students of class IX . A structured course curriculum on the basis of the needs of the students has been designed. The benchmark has been set this year with the school, highly impressed with last year performance, has given us a batch of 127 students against 88 last year. Kudos to our seniors for this!

Waste Management - The idea is to utilize the food waste generated in the mess & canteen for productive purposes. The objective is to identify the possible ways of utilizing food wastes, which are ecologically and economically sustainable. The project is handled by the team of students from MBA - Energy and Environment. This is an excellent example of using our core competencies effectively for the amelioration of the community.

Green Team - It is a mass level campaign to save our environment from the clutches of the ever spreading menace of pollution and deforestation.

We also plan to continue our helping hand to the physically handicapped students studying at ―Mahatma Phule Apang Prashikshan Kendra‖ at Mann, a local school at Mann village by imparting the customized computer and Spoken English training. A team of two students is working on finalising the structure of the program for this year.

We intend to grow from the present stage of Ankuran (sprouting) to Pushpan (Flowering) and thus a start has been made, a dream has been seen , which is the assimilation of the ideas of lokasamgraha” (general welfare) ,“karmayoga” (service), blended with “bhaktiyoga” (devotion) leading to our work becoming worship, a “sevayoga" (service)

Let each SIIbian understand the real essence of life and his responsibility to lead the change and become socially conscious managers because

People will forget what you said ...
people will forget what you did ...

but people will never forget how you made them feel...

Prateek Sharma (09-11)