ET Awards 2015: Infosys Foundation walks away with Corporate Citizen award

Infosys Science Foundation, and Infosys Foundation, along with its overseas arm Infosys Foundation USA are driving the CSR activities of Infosys in areas seldom explored by corporates – science and math. The need to evangelize science and math across educational, social and professional hierarchies, globally, has spurred this move. The ET Awards jury has lauded the tremendous effort put in by the company.

In 2014-15, the company spent INR 243 crore (two percent of its profits) on CSR activities. Over the past year, academic and research campuses, from the elite TATA Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to school children, have attended the lectures by eminent jurors and awardees of the Infosys Prize. Among them are Manjul Bhargava, Professor at Princeton University and Madhu Sudan, Principal Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In September 2014, Infosys Foundation identified Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) to constitute a corpus of INR 30 crore to help in the endeavor. Making a mark internationally, in April 2015, Infosys Foundation USA, announced a program with Code.org to expand access to computer science education for students in the US.

Closer home, this initiative has helped train 680 middle school science and math teachers in rural Karnataka. Evangelizing mathematics is, therefore, not restricted to higher learning institutes only. For the Infosys Science Foundation and Infosys Foundation, it starts right at the grassroots — at the school level.

Published with permission from Economic Times