CB BureauCanon India recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of the adoption of Maharaja Katte village at Kanakapura Taluk (near Bengaluru) under their ‘Adopt a Village’ initiative. This is one of the flagship programmes of the company with special focus given to the development of over 1,300 villagers and all-inclusive development of children in the village school. Canon has adopted three more villages: namely Maheshwari in Haryana, Karanjoti in Mumbai, and Sol Gohalia in Kolkata.
The initiative’s objective is to help in the overall development of a village, keeping the focus on Canon’s 4 Es – that is, improving education facilities, environment conservation, eye-care services, and empowering villagers. In terms of education, infrastructural upgradation has been done in the local school and higher number of enrolled students and lower dropout and absenteeism rates have been recorded. Remedial education and teaching assistance is provided through dedicated teachers for English, maths and science. On environment, organic farming has been taken up for midday meals and planting drives are organised. Thirty-seven solar-street lights have also been installed. The vision centre has screened more than 2,000 patients and more than 100 surgeries have been conducted. A vocational training centre has been established which encourages digital education, with a trainer providing computer literacy.
To commemorate the occasion, Kazutada Kobayashi, president and CEO of Canon India, along with 50 employees from the Bengaluru and Canon ISDC (India Systems Development Centre) offices visited the village. Sports and cultural activities were organised with all participants being felicitated.
This is what Kobayashi said: ‘Through Canon India Involve, we are committed towards driving meaningful and welfare-centric initiatives that impact lives and make communities future-ready. Having understood the needs and requirements of the village, we have undertaken several development activities towards infrastructure and the holistic improvement of the children, over the course of last four years. For us the real impact of our initiatives is measured by the number of smiling faces, reduced school dropout ratio, improved attendance, increased count of girl child, among other integral factors.’