The Hindu Business Line : <I> Greening and you </I>

Everytime one flies Jet Airways, one is approached by a member of the cabin crew giving one an opportunity to contribute to a child relief fund. As long as one can remember, the airline has been collecting funds for the cause ever since it was launched in the early 1990s. On the face of it, this is an innocuous enough activity on a flight, being welcomed by some and dismissed by others as an unwanted encroachment on one's privacy.

Certainly, it depends on the way one looks at it, but the fact remains that the airline has been doing yeoman's service to the cause of child relief — the true significance of which is somewhat lost when it is clothed in impersonal, generic terms such as `child relief' but takes on a vibrant, personal dimension when one can see in one's mind's eye an orphan being able to write on a notebook with a pen which has been bought with the money one has contributed.

All-inclusive action

The import of citing this particular example is to focus on the fact that relief work such as this — which connects the grassroots-level citizen (in this case airline passengers) with the well-being of orphans (future citizens who have begun their lives at a great disadvantage for no fault of their own) — is nothing but activity of the highest social order because it tries to involve a much larger number of people in a sphere of action which, normally, would have been ignored and bypassed in the pressing humdrum of daily life faced by the average citizen. In other words, the model of relief work which this illustration indicates is useful and should, therefore, be used by other people who are engaged in important social activity (which need not be confined to the world of child relief) and who would like to tap the individual at the grassroots level for maximum impact.

Light of life

Indeed, another example which readily comes to mind is the sale of colourful, decorative diyas at the billing counters of big, retail chains run by respectable, national industrial houses, the traditional lamps being made by handicapped children. Clearly, it is not the specific product one is looking at but at the laughing (or perhaps doleful) eyes of the children whose nimble fingers have made them, an imagery which will fail to make an impact only on the hardest of human souls.

Seen in this perspective, one can only have the highest respect and approbation for the Kolkata-based ITC Ltd, a business giant straddling the Indian private sector corporate scene, which is currently involved in spreading the message of greening of the environment through the sale of school notebooks. What basically the company intends to do is to let the child know directly that a part of the cost of the notebook will be used to plant trees which, in the first place, is used to make the paper of the notebook on which he or she will write.

How the company goes about communicating this vital link is its business, and there is little doubt that, given the unbounded enthusiasm of its chief executive about the project, it will ultimately succeed in attaining its objective. In doing so the company will have educated Young India on the preciousness of the idea of sustaining the environment and, second, it will have set a grand example for Indian business on how the utmost should be done to propagate larger social ideals and targets through the sale of products, which is essentially a discrete, company-specific activity.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

More Stories on : Environment | Children & Parenting | View Point

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