Five students who have just graduated from Cambridge have arrived in India to spend the next seven weeks working on community development projects.

They have been selected to join an international student internship programme run by India’s most respected business house.

The University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, signed agreements with Tata Sons last year to take part in the Tata International Social Entrepreneurship Scheme (TISES).
 

This programme offers students a distinctive experiential internship in the ongoing corporate sustainability projects of Tata companies in India, enabling them to learn about living, working and contributing to development in rural India. In turn the interns bring international perspectives and practices to these projects. Thereby, the programme promotes international understanding.

Sian Herschel, who has just completed her MBA at Judge Business School and Clare College, will be working in villages around Jamshedpur. She will be exploring the social and economic development of women in self-help groups through micro-finance. Having lived and worked in South America, where she spent three years in Peru, and South Africa she has a keen interest in Corporate Social Responsibility work. This will be the first time she has been to Asia.
 

Nick Evans who learnt last week he had achieved a Starred First in Social Anthropology at King’s College, has a keen interest in India having visited Mumbai last summer to research the ethnography of laughter yoga. He will be based in Babrala, 80 kilometres east of Delhi where Tata Chemicals has a plant. He will be working with local farmers on land reclamation, altering the alkalinity of the soil to turn wasteland into good agricultural land.
 

Like Sian, Andrew Panton who studied Law at Downing College is going to be working around Jamshedpur. He will be doing an impact assessment study of an ongoing project in Jharkhand that focuses on land and water management. He will be looking at how to improve villagers’ livelihoods through effective land and water management, investigating the effectiveness of what is already in place and working out how to make improvements.
 

Rosalynn Watt, who has just completed a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Emmanuel College, will also be based in Jamshedpur. She has never been to India before and has always wanted to go as her grandfather once worked in nearby Kolkata. She will also be working on a water management project looking at the impact of an irrigation system on a community.
 

David Nefs, who has just graduated with a First in Economics at Churchill College, will be working in Mithapur to make a blueprint to improve the current Human Development Index of the core villages of the project. Also on his first visit to India he has a keen interest in development work and spent some of his gap year working at an orphanage in Kenya.
 

TISES coordinator Helen Haugh of Judge Business School said: “Through TISES our students have the opportunity to make a real contribution to people’s lives in India as well as discovering much about this fascinating country.”

About Tata Group:
Tata companies operate in seven business sectors: communications and information technology, engineering, materials, services, energy, consumer products and chemicals. They are, by and large, based in India and have significant international operations. The total revenue of Tata companies, taken together, was $62.5 billion (around Rs. 251,543 crore) in 2007-08, with 61 per cent of this coming from business outside India, and they employ around 350,000 people worldwide. The Tata name has been respected in India for 140 years for its adherence to strong values and business ethics.

Every Tata company or enterprise operates independently. Each of these companies has its own board of directors and shareholders, to whom it is answerable. There are 27 publicly listed Tata enterprises and they have a combined market capitalization of some $60 billion, and a shareholder base of 3.2 million. The major Tata companies are Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Tata Power, Tata Chemicals, Tata Tea, Indian Hotels and Tata Communications.

Visit the Project Reports link above right for accounts from last Summer’s TISES participants of their experiences.
 

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