IndiGo’s CSR arm, IndiGoReach in partnership with Grameen Sahara has been working towards the development of a socio-economic ecosystem to support 1,670 tribal women across 24 villages in Assam and Meghalaya.  The program empowered women farmers to better promote spices, mainly turmeric, ginger, black pepper, and king chilli, to substantially increase their annual income. These women hail from the villages in the Assam-Meghalaya border areas in Kamrup and Ri Bhoi districts.

IndiGoReach constantly strives to address issues that span across initiatives they care about—everything from education to empowerment to social aid that reaches the people who need it the most. And the solutions are as diverse as the issues at hand. Hence, IndiGo reach decided to partner with Grameen Sahara, as they come with extensive experience of working on livelihood promotion in the region. Through this association, they have been able to work on providing institutional support to women by creating women farmers institutions by advocating best practices that will enhance the volume with consistent production for farmers. 

Speaking about the initiatives of the CSR program, Sukhjit Pasricha, Chief Human Resource Officer, IndiGo, said, “Women Empowerment is one of the 4 pillars of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) interventions at IndiGo. We have been working in the domain of women empowerment since the last 4-5 years across the country. Our focus has been to help women increase their income and correspondingly bring about positive changes in their lives. We found the right partner in Grameen Sahara and together we have been able to meaningfully impact the lives of 1670 families with a 90% increase in their income. We have helped set up two Farmers’ Producers Organisation which will ensure sustainability of the initiative and leverage support from wider stakeholders during and after the project. We believe in positively impacting the communities to bring about holistic growth across various segments of the society, spurring socio-economic growth of our country.”

North East India is a very important for IndiGo and its 1^st commercial aircraft was operated on 4^th August, 2006 between Delhi to Guwahati and Imphal. The fact that IndiGo has been passionately involved with the region through their business or through their CSR programs, has contributed to bring some of the best corporate governance practices and learnings from across the country to the region.

Some of the government schemes that project beneficiaries accessed were Ujjwala Yojana, under which LPG connections are distributed to women from Below Poverty Line families; Jandhan Yojana which provides affordable access to financial services like bank accounts, remittances, credit, insurance and pensions, Kisan credit card Yojana which helps farmers acquire short-term loans; Widow Pension Yojana and Antyodaya Anna Yojana that supplies highly subsidized food to millions of the poorest families.