Will expand initiatives like youth employment, bridgeIT: Milind Lakkad

Chennai: India’s largest IT services provider by revenue, Tata Consultancy Services, is stepping up corporate social responsibility initiatives, focusing on areas such as education, skilling, entrepreneurship and employment, as the IT bellwether looks to capitalise on its strength in the digital domain.

The Mumbai-based software services exporter’s mission is to connect people to opportunities in the digital economy, focusing on women, youth and the marginalized. The company has made long-term sustained investments to empower India's youth through both employment and entrepreneurship. For 2019-20, it spent Rs 602 crore on its CSR initiatives.

“We are going to expand programs like Youth Employment and BridgeIT (Village Entrepreneurship) exponentially going forward. While we have done a significant amount of work, 250 out of the 725 districts are already covered. We are going to go to a significant number of colleges,” said Milind Lakkad, chief human resources officer of TCS.


TCS, the Tata Group's biggest company, has won the ET Corporate Citizen of the Year Award 2020, for demonstrating exemplary corporate citizenship.

“The recognition comes because of the Tata group and the ethos of the group comes naturally to us in many ways,” Lakkad said.

The IT behemoth, through its youth employment programme, has served both engineering and non-engineering students across 250 districts and 270 colleges. The students are placed in some of the best companies in India, including TCS which has employed 10,000 people through this programme over the past years.

TCS has used these tools to “democratise talent” - hiring talent from small towns through its national qualifier test (NQT).

“It doesn't matter where you come from, which institute you come from, as long as you have the capability, you can come in and appear," Lakkad said. The initiative not only creates jobs within TCS, but also for a much larger ecosystem within India.

Women form one-third of its workforce and TCS has several programmes that encourage diversity.

The company runs an Excel programme, where senior women leaders are brought in from middle management level. The program mentors and coaches them throughout and ensures that they take up a role chosen by the company, whether as a client partner for an account or as a unit head.

For Lakkad himself, the journey has been quite immersive, having been a 34-year TCS veteran. Coming back to India from the United States in 2002 was a big decision. Lakkad took over as the CHRO shortly before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“To me, as an organisation, how we managed the pandemic situation was important,” he said. “It was not that there was a strategy in place, and then one acted upon it. It was basically all of us seniors, starting with our CEO, myself, coming together every day and looking into things.”

Through the virus outbreak, TCS digitally reimagined all of its flagship CSR initiatives, such as the Youth Employment Programme across India, BridgeIT for village entrepreneurship and GoIT for teaching Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics skills to children in Western geographies.

The company also revamped its NQT, with 300,000 people appearing together for the test from the comfort of their homes.

To Lakkad, the best way to deal with the pandemic was to make sure that everybody believed that they were being taken care of by the company.