Message by CEO

Our mission, ‘Serving Society through Science’, is our commitment towards providing solutions to challenges facing society by harnessing the fruits of science for goals that go beyond business. Our aim is to constantly endeavour to make the world safer, cleaner and greener for future generations through science.

The year 2014-15, marking 75 years of Tata Chemicals, was special. A slew of initiatives were taken up including the release of the book ‘Salt of the Earth’, which documented the 75-year journey of our company.

In pursuit of our mission, we inaugurated and set up a state-of-art Innovation Centre at Pune, India. This centre will be the company’s technology and innovation hub and it will incubate and support the company’s growth vectors in wellness foods, agri and chemistry solutions. It will also provide technology support to other Tata group companies. We have a history of leading industry and, as we build on our past, we believe that technology, innovation and customer immersion are critical enablers in our next phase of profitable growth and our journey to create value for all our stakeholders. We plan to dovetail our consumer insights with product development processes to provide solutions that are unique and valued by our consumers and customers.

We have identified key sustainability challenges to address and help us achieve our vision of becoming an even more socially responsible corporate citizen. While safety, climate change and energy are common across our organisation, each business unit and location has made efforts to identify issues specific to them through in-depth materiality studies. These include biodiversity, supply chain engagement, water, promotion of livelihoods, skill development, diversity and inclusion. We hope to sharpen our focus on each of these areas in the coming years. Additionally, we will also be sensitive to global concerns arising out processes such as UN development goals and commitments from COP 21, to name a few.

Safety continues to be a key challenge, and while we have improved tremendously, the fatality in India early this year has once again brought the point forward that the journey on safety needs even more attention. We have ramped up our safety drive: “Target Zero Harm” – Zero harm to people, asset and environment through adoption of world-class voluntary standards such as OHSAS 18001, Responsible Care and British Safety Council guidelines. We have set ourselves a target of reducing our carbon intensity by 20 per cent by 2020. While the journey of reduction has had its ups and downs over the years, we are exploring all options across our value chain to achieve this and have expanded our scope to include operations outside India as well. We continue to report on our carbon performance through the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

Reduction of the carbon footprint has also been through actions taken by our supply chain. Movement of maximum material through railways, use of bulkers, and reuse of packing are some of the means adopted.

We believe that our employees are our strength and we continue to build a more inclusive and a diverse workplace along with focusing on building skills and competencies through e-enabled in-house and external programmes.

Our CSR programmes continue to engage with and back our key communities both directly and indirectly through the various organisations that we support. Key among them is Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development, Uday Foundation, Okhai - Centre for Empowerment (a social enterprise promoting artisans), Tata Chemicals Golden Jubilee Foundation and Magadi Soda Foundation. Our employees are actively engaged through volunteering programmes of Hope and Tata Engage.

Our sustainability programmes are driven at the board level through the corporate social responsibility, safety and sustainability (CSS) committee. This committee guides and reviews CSS performance of the enterprise.

We continue to be committed to UN Global Compact and Responsible Care and follow the precautionary principles as defined in Principle-15 of the Rio Declaration. We periodically map all material aspects to understand the stakeholder, which covered most of our businesses and locations. Materiality mapping of TCE operations are underway and would be completed by 2015 end.

The company’s other major achievements include being recognised at different forums for Business Excellence, Responsible Care, Safety Management Systems, Environmental Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Communications.

We continuously engage with our large customer base; a recent example is our partnership with Unilever on responsible mining. We are working in close partnerships to improve overall sustainability performance in our supply chain. We have initiated mapping of our suppliers through supply chain sustainability guidelines. In the coming years, we will be taking up deeper engagement with our suppliers on sustainability.

Our goal is to make an organisation that is even more responsible, transparent and responsive to its stakeholder’s needs. We believe that the commitment to sustainability and triple bottom line will ensure our global competitiveness and promote inclusive sustainable growth.

R MUKUNDAN
MD & CEO, Tata Chemicals Limited