Year-End quote – Mr. Sumanta Kar, Senior Deputy National Director, SOS Children’s Villages of India
“SOS Children’s Villages of India supports close to 25,000 children and youth through two flagship programmes – Family Like Care, a curative model that provides loving homes to children without parental care in Children’s Villages. Family Strengthening, a preventive model that intervenes in vulnerable communities for preventing ‘at risk’ children from losing parental care by upholding family income through women empowerment and capacity building. The year 2020 has been eventful in many ways.
The pandemic impacted children under our care in several ways. As we self-implement these programmes, our teams quickly adapted by building the capacity of caregivers and coworkers, safeguarding villages from infection, enabling digital learning for children, looking after their emotional wellbeing, supplying essential food and hygiene kits to vulnerable families who lost livelihoods and so on.
The year also witnessed four cyclones (Amphan and Nisagra in the second quarter and more recently Nivar and Burevi in the southern region) causing a further blow. All these disasters have rendered millions homeless and without a livelihood. Our teams evacuated cyclone-affected families and shifted them to safer places, providing essential supplies – food, water, shelter, clothing, and medicines. They are currently working on restoration for the families affected.
We signed two MoUs with the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of Gujarat for providing technical expertise and for being the nodal agency for the State’s Kinship Care and After Care programmes. The annual cultural festival e-Tarang was hosted virtually. The event witnessed participation from over 700 children from both the programmes across 32 locations/22 states. We have reached out to 2500 new children in 2020 through our community outreach interventions.
We have also set up two quarantine centres in Bhopal and Pune, wherein abundant children are getting family-like care and are being prevented from the impact of COVID-19. Our teams are working tirelessly to help secure the livelihoods of families in the communities we serve. We plan to reach out to 8000 new children in 2021 and there is a need for greater collaboration. We are grateful to our partners and sponsors for their continued support.”
Year-ender statement from HCL Technologies-
The COVID-19 Pandemic is responsible for a year unlike any in decades, creating uncertainty and fear across the world while posing a historic health crises. In parallel the pandemic has acted as a spark-point for parallel crises – whole economies and businesses of all sizes, industry sectors, governments and societies have faced significant impact. No segment of population has been immune to these impacts, as geo-political conflicts, social change movements, labor and human capital challenges and inequalities of many types have surfaced.
The Technology Industry as a whole, and Technology Services in particular, have been able to manage through the turbulence and will emerge stronger overall. Global IT companies, including those of Indian origin, are experiencing business recovery and strengthening outlooks as clients around the world seek and shift their investments to more Technology and Automation to drive their businesses forward, enable remote working and ensure that their data is secure. More Clients today are shifting their Applications to the Cloud, generating better business opportunities for Indian technology providers.
The year 2021 will see massive Digital acceleration across all Sectors. COVID-19 has proven that technology can be the single greatest factor in enabling businesses to survive AND thrive. From a market-demand perspective, Tech Services companies are seeing strong interest across all Sectors to invest and capitalize the opportunities created through faster Cloud Migration, Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Analytics and Internet of Things technology solutions and managed services – all these will be critical strategies and components of the enterprise that will live well the COVID-19 environment.
Sectors like Energy, Manufacturing and Auto may see slower recovery while others like Technology, Telecom, Life Sciences, and Financial Services will continue to have strong growth. Additionally, Sectors heavily impacted by the pandemic, such as Retail, Auto, Travel, Hospitality, etc. are in the process of transforming and redefining their business models and customer engagement for ‘zero-touch’ interactions, by leveraging Conversational AI, Analytics and numerous Digital Innovations. HCL Technologies, as a leading global technology solutions, services and platform provider, is very well positioned to lead and partner with leading F500 and G2000 companies around the world to create, strengthen and transform the digital enterprises of the future – for today.
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