Bajaj Auto Foundation commits Rs 400cr to empower women engineers

Bajaj Auto’s CSR arm Bajaj Auto Foundation on Thursday announced it is committing Rs 400 crore over the next decade to empower women engineers, and unveiled its unified vision towards skilling and empowerment. The initiative will be implemented through the Rupa Rahul Bajaj Scholarship for Women in Engineering (RRBSWE), it said. The announcement was made at an event held at the company’s headquarters in Pune in the presence of Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairperson and Founder of Biocon Limited, and Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director of Bajaj Auto Ltd. It also formally unveiled the scholarship identity and felicitated the inaugural cohort of 506 meritorious young scholars from 40 reputed engineering institutions, considered to be the country’s largest scholarship programme for women in core engineering. The scholarship has been conceived for meritorious young women pursuing core engineering disciplines, including mechanical, electronics, industrial instrumentation, mechatronics, robotics engineering and allied fields. Under the programme, scholars will receive financial support of up to Rs 8 lakh across the course of their engineering education at 40 leading engineering institutions, including IITs, NITs, IIITs, and reputed state and private universities, the foundation said. The event also saw the unveiling of Bajaj Auto Foundation’s unified vision towards skilling and empowerment. “Women possess inherent skills of patience, empathy and diligence, which are very strong attributes to excel in core engineering jobs. We identified this long back and made women engineers a significant part of our workforce. In fact, from virtually no women in our operations till around a decade back, today they account for nearly 20 per cent of our workforce,” said Rajiv Bajaj.