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Twenty-two young people have started businesses
in Pune, the former city of Poona, India, and are
already employing 60 more young people. They have
achieved this with the help of an initiative by
Diageo (in which Grand Metropolitan has merged with
Guinness).
International Distillers and Vintners, which was
part of GrandMet, has a plant at Pune. So staff
from there can offer advice to the new
entrepreneurs.
The Pune initiative results from a search by
Deepak Roy, IDV’s manager in India, for useful
roles the company could play in an Indian society
wary of foreign-owned companies. He decided it
should become a founder of the India Business
Community Partnership which aims to promote fair
and honest management and involvement with the
community. Deepak Roy further agreed with the
Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust (Indian Youth
Empowerment Trust) that it would start an
enterprise scheme in Pune and GrandMet would back
it.
BYST, founded in 1991, is sponsored by the
Confederation of Indian Industry and modelled on
the Prince’s Youth Business Trust in the United
Kingdom. (GrandMet was also one of the first
backers of Youth Enterprise Services International,
set up in 1993 to spread the Prince’s Trust idea of
youth enterprise programmes.)
At Pune, BYST provides loans of up to 50,000
rupees (£1,000) at 10 per cent, a reduced rate
of interest, to unemployed people aged under 35.
Laxmi Venkatesh, executive vice-president of BYST,
says new businesses need opportunity, finance,
advice and support, all of which BYST is
supplying.
The British High Commissioner, Sir David
Gore-Booth, presented the first cheques in May
1996. BYST had by then received £533,000 from
the British aid programme. Some of the British aid
was for release only if a British company also put
in money. GrandMet was the first to take up the
challenge.
The first people to receive loans included D A
Satpute and his wife Rajeshri, who had been
trainees at a workshop for the disabled. Their new
business is in light engineering and hand moulding
of plastic. A third of the businesses helped by
BYST at Pune are run by disabled people or by
women.
Involvement with local communities is Diageo’s
policy for its businesses throughout the world.
Technologists at Pillsbury, the ‘Green Giant’
empire based in Minneapolis, got interested in a
nutrition problem brought by the agency Meals for
Millions. Indians living in the High Andes of
Bolivia grow quinoa grain, which is hard for
weaning infants in particular to digest unless it
is well milled and cooked.
The technologists devised a new mill, based on
handmills used in the United States in the 1880s.
They also adapted a solar cooker. The use of these
is now spreading through Latin America. Gerald Rabe
of Pillsbury says: “We had the knowledge to do what
was needed and we were successful. We take pride in
what we achieved.”
In South Africa, after Gilbeys, also part of the
group, closed a plant in 1995, it set up the
Beehive, a centre for fostering new businesses and
offering adult education. The local community were
brought in from the start so that, in two years,
the Beehive could stand on its own feet. Within the
first six months, the space there was fully let to
businesses.
In China, Pillsbury has promoted better-run
business through Shanghai Business Leadership 2000.
This has offered training to managers in
state-owned enterprises to help them tackle the
social effects of industrial change.
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