Huawei Technologies India Spent INR 1.43 Crore On CSR Last Year

Huawei India R&D Centre is the first overseas software development center of Huawei, a global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Established in the year 1999 in Bengaluru, the India R&D center formally known as Huawei Technologies India, spent a total of 1.43 crore rupees on corporate social responsibility in 2017-18. Here’s a summary of what transpired.

Focus area

With an objective to support harmonious social development by undertaking and investing in basic civic infrastructure such as clean drinking water in villages, proper sanitation facilities in government-run schools in villages, etc. Huawei Technologies India Pvt. Ltd (HTIPL) undertook building of Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant facilities in nearby villages benefitting more than 4,000 families and toilet blocks in 10 government run schools.

New vision

In 2017, Huawei confirmed its new vision, which is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei India R&D Center took up CSR initiatives that will address these challenges.
Between the years 2015 to 2018, they set up four innovation labs focusing on future oriented technologies like Deep Learning, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Augmented Reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and cloud giving engineering students an opportunity to be industry ready.

Highlights of CSR activities

1. Clean Drinking Water Projects
Huawei India R&D Centre has built 10 drinking water facilities (RO Plant), and is building 6 more such facilities. Each RO Plant has a capacity to dispense 500 units of 20 litres of clean drinking water every day, which will benefit more than 4,000 families from these villages.

These facilities are built in a 50:50 partnership between Huawei and the Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) (Under the MLA Local Development Grant Scheme).

Nandhini, a migrant labourer lives with her family of six in a rural part of Bengaluru city in India. She and her family consume about two 20-litre cans of water to drink in a week. Her family paid about 30-40 INR for a can of water bought from the nearest departmental store from their weekly wages. Today, Nandhini pays 5 INR for 20 ltrs of clean and safe drinking water saving up about 60-70 INR every week.

2. Improving Sanitation Facilities at Schools

Identifying that sanitation and hygiene in school makes a visible impact on the health and hygiene of children, the company set out to build basic sanitation facilities and toilet blocks for the children at 10 government-run schools at villages in Bengaluru contributing to ‘Swachh Bharat: Swachh vidyalaya’, a national campaign driving ‘Clean India: Clean Schools’ by the Indian government.

The initiative has successfully benefitted over 3,000 children in these schools, while increasing enrolment, regular attendance making a visible impact on the health and hygiene of children through improvement in their health and hygiene practices, and those of their families and the communities.

3. Improving School Infrastructure

One of biggest reason cited by dropouts of govt. run schools in Bengaluru among others is the lack of infrastructure resulting in a downward slide in enrolment and attendance. The students in many of the city’s government schools are forced to sit on the floor or on rugs, as the schools do not have basic infrastructure of benches and desks for children.

To enable a better infrastructure that will benefit students of govt. run schools which is mostly attended by underprivileged children, Huawei India R&D Center provided school desks and benches reaching over 1000 students from various govt. schools located in Bengaluru.

The R&D Centre also distributed sturdy school bags with stationery items and other essentials to close to 800 children from 4 schools enabling and supporting a better education.

4. Huawei Merit Scholarships

To motivate aspiring engineering students, Huawei has offered scholarships to 84 students from top engineering colleges in India. These scholarships are awarded to students based on merit and economic status.

Through these scholarships Huawei India R&D Center aims to develop long term relationships with top tier colleges and universities to foster best talent in ICT industry. In addition to scholarships, the program will also include project internships, tech talks with students by our SMEs and designing curriculum to suit industry requirements as relevant.

In 2018, they completed the third set of scholarships followed by talks at these colleges from business leaders on upcoming technologies, how students can excel and build areas of expertise and more.

The scholarship recipients visited the India R&D Centre campus as part of this program to better understand the technologies the company works on and interact with business leaders.―The CSR Journal