There is a moral deficit in businesses, which have been too masculine, grasping, marauding,” declares Father KS Casimir, Director, XLRI NCR Campus, dramatically. “So business education cannot be as normal, we need to realign and bring forth the feminine aspect. Only that will make the future corporate leaders holistic and balanced. When women are at the helm of affairs, they manage things more compassionately. The future needs to be female,” he says.

“At XLRI, where our motto is “for the greater good”, there is also a moral imperative on us to foster, nurture and promote leaders who will ensure that people are not marginalised,” he adds.

And so, enter the Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusive Leadership (CGEIL), which the 75-year old institution has set up within the precincts of its Jhajjar campus. It was set up in 2020, with faculty members of XLRI and its alumni sitting down together to create the framework. The idea was to make gender equality and inclusive leadership a lived experience across all facets of society.

Bold leap

Post Covid, in 2023, the structure of the Centre changed a bit, with a chairperson and a board of advisors brought in. Corporate sector veteran Pritha Dutt — who runs a social enterprise MeraBizNet that enables businesses owned by women from the low and middle income category to grow — chairs the Centre.

Ask Dutt, how CGEIL hopes to make a difference, considering there already exist so many outfits with similar goals of empowering women and fostering diversity and inclusion, and she says, “You are right in a way and yet if you look year after year at the indicators of gender parity and female equality, we are at the bottom of the heap. There is a need to move the needle. There is a need to intervene at all the intersections — women and health, women and climate, women and participative decision making... We cannot wait for women to wield power, but we need to take the initiative to speed up things.”

The action-oriented Dutt has lost no time in speeding things up at the Centre, which is working on many fronts simultaneously. On the one hand, there is impact-focussed research that aims to influence policy and on the other hand there is skilling and training with the idea of economic empowerment. There is also a move to embed gender sensitivity and inclusivity in education, starting right from the XLRI classrooms itself.

Instead of replicating things, Dutt, an XLRI alumnus and part of the very dynamic and dashing XL4W (XL for women) group, has leveraged on her strong network, roping in a formidable board of advisors and also drawing upon the strength of the alumni. On the board are names like Madhvi Lall, Managing Director and head of HR at Deutsche Bank, Kanta Singh, deputy country representative, UN Women India, and Lakshmi C, MD – Human Resources Lead, Accenture India.

Upward Ho!

On the training front, the passion projects that XL4W had started for women in the corporate sector in order to increase their participation in the workforce is now under the aegis of CGEIL. There is up! SURGE, aimed at women in middle and senior positions and grooming them for leadership (already 500 women have experienced the programme). There is up! SWING aimed at women in the first five years of their career, who often drop out, helping them to stay the course. “Soon there will be up! SPARK, aimed at Blue Collar women,” says Dutt.

On the research front, CGEIL has signed up projects with the Reliance Model Economic Township right in the vicinity of the institute to study how the process of industrialisation in the area has impacted the socio-cultural landscape in the 22 villages where it had acquired land from and the impact of specific CSR interventions made by the corporate in the area.

In Jharkhand and Orissa, research projects are being explored in partnership with TISS and with the guidance of UNDP, looking at tribal and marginalised populations and their access to education and employment, with the idea of generating actionable insights. In all the research, the XLRI faculty are getting involved.

In Himachal Pradesh, in partnership with IIT Mandi, projects on entrepreneurship are being explored. “There are huge opportunities in areas like energy, drones, robotics... that are worth exploring,” says Dutt.

Going forward, Dutt says, CGEIL will be introducing a postgraduate course around gender and inclusive development. “We also want to offer an elective for MBA students and hope to be ready with it late this year,” she says.

The ideas seem lofty and dauntingly ambitious. But XLRI has one secret weapon to make it achievable — a really strong network of alumni that comes running whenever the institution beckons. And being family is rather forthright — candidly telling the directors, they want to see change begin at the institution itself.