Even before MG Motor India began its manufacturing operations in the country, it steered its focus on diversity, community and innovation. As part of its intent to contribute to society, the company has taken several initiatives, including a skill development programme for underprivileged women, associating with NGOs engaged in providing quality education to the girl child and roping in women to assemble cars at its Halon plant.
Associating with TRAX NGO, the carmaker has launched its community connect programme focusing on health, road safety, and a clean environment, even before its first vehicle hits the market. It trained teachers and educated school students across 300 schools in Gurugram and Faridabad around road safety.
The company partnered with Baroda Citizens Council and launched ‘Prerna,’ a one-year Skill Development programme to train 100 underprivileged women. Called MG SEWA, it has created a financial platform for them and their families in the long term.
With IIMPACT, an NGO engaged in providing quality education to girls through its learning centres in remote villages across the country, the OEM initiated its community development and diversity. The company adopted 30 learning centres run by NGOs across India to provide quality education to girl children hailing from socially and economically underprivileged households in remote areas across India. It also contributed a certain amount from selling every MG vehicle to the learning centres operated by IIMPACT.
About a year ago, the company demonstrated that glass ceilings no longer exist even in an erstwhile male-dominated industry such as automobile manufacturing by announcing that it has manufactured its 50,000th MG Hector with an all-women crew.
The initiative has created a new benchmark while celebrating ‘Diversity’ – one of the core pillars of the automaker – as women led the end-to-end production. In this first-of-its-kind development, women-only teams were involved in panel-pressing of sheet metal and welding to painting jobs, as well as carrying out post-production test runs.
At present, about 33% of its workforce is women, and they work shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts across all business functions.
Participating at the launch function of Women In Mobility, last year, organised by Mobility Outlook, Rajeev Chaba, President & Managing Director, MG Motor India, said, “Technology is the greatest leveller, as at MG Motor India, a 22-year old female engineer teaches her 50 plus-year-old male boss on technology as he is not natural to certain things. With the rapid adoption of technologies like electric, shared and autonomous, we need young talent. For our Hector, which is our connected car, the 22-year old lady who finished her GT programme is the boss. We are hiring more fresh engineers, and most of them are female. Our only challenge is to hire senior women leaders, who can groom these young women to become a better leader of tomorrow.”
Since 2018, MG has hired many female associates in its manufacturing facility via various initiatives. Today, these women are driving core areas of manufacturing at the facility. MG’s state-of-the-art Halol manufacturing facility is further equipped with Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for various workshops.
The company believes that both men and women can handle the machinery with equal competency if trained well. MG Motor India is a future-ready organisation that is trying to set the industry benchmarks not only in terms of a young & smart work culture but also in terms of diversity.