Honour for ITC Limited at Rio+20 Summit - The Hindu
June 22, 2012
ITC Ltd has bagged the '2012 World Business and Development Award' for the transformational rural initiatives in social and farm forestry programmes at the Rio+20 United Nations Summit in Rio de Janeiro. ITC is among five large global companies to win this honour.
"I received this award with humility and pride on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of tribals and poor farmers whose lives have been transformed by ITC's social and farm forestry initiative. It gives us tremendous encouragement to witness the global appreciation for this initiative and this recognition will indeed help us in taking this initiative to newer heights," ITC chairman Y C Deveshwar said after receiving the award.
ITC's social and farm forestry programmes provides sustainable livelihoods to rural wasteland owners by helping convert their wastelands into pulpwood plantations. While farm forestry focuses on farmers owning wastelands, social forestry targets resource-poor tribals and farmers. Currently the programmes cover over 125,000 hectares.
