All the late nights and early mornings finally paid off. With lots of expectations and excitement, I stepped into IIM Ranchi and it was like a dream come true for any MBA – HR aspirant like me. I knew it was not going to be a fairy tale and I will have to work very hard to live up to the college expectations. I made sure to do a lot of research about the Institute before coming here as I did not want to appear out of place amongst my new classmates. I was already overwhelmed with the kind of cooperation I was getting from my seniors to adjust to the new settings. But when I finally reached the hostel there was a thing that particularly caught my attention. In the mess area, I could find these stickers saying – ‘Clean Plates’, ‘Save water’, ‘Be responsible’ etc. Upon doing a little bit of research I learned about UNGC PRME.
United Nations Global Compact- Principles for Responsible Management Education (UNGC PRME) is an initiative founded in 2007 to raise the profile of sustainability in schools around the world, and to equip today’s business students with the understanding and ability to deliver change tomorrow. I was impressed with my institute’s foresight to recognize the call of the moment and actually begin contributing towards the objective of sustainability.
I felt honored to learn that IIM Ranchi is the first IIM to become the signatory of UNGC PRME. Motivated by these initiatives I joined the action as a student volunteer for UNGC PRME committee in IIM Ranchi. At IIM Ranchi, we strive each day to promote a sustainable mindset. We work to reduce our consumption of resources. We achieve our ambitious goals of sustainability through research, academic coursework or community engagement initiatives. Our engagements and research work are how we bring the “Holistic development of individual, institutions and the society at large” part of our mission to life.
With the target of achieving all 17 sustainable goals in the coming future, we started off with – Zero hunger and Responsible consumption and production. The UNGC PRME Steering Committee of IIM Ranchi has launched 2 pilot initiatives for conservation of the two most important resources in modern lives- food and electricity. To promulgate awareness among the IIM Ranchi family members (students, teaching staff and non-teaching staff) about food wastage different measures like Posters and Flash mailers with catchy phrases are being circulated along with the data for world/country/state/city vs. institute level statistics.
This has also helped to ingrain a psychological impact and create sensitivity towards food wastage issue. For conservation of electricity, we conducted a competition between various hostel blocks in Khelegaon, with POCs (who volunteered themselves) in each block to run the campaign. The block with the maximum electricity savings (as compared to the previous month) was declared the winner. We are also aiming to promote the awareness of other SDGs in the near future.
I have come to realize that business and management schools play a key role in shaping the mindsets and skills of future leaders and can be powerful drivers of corporate sustainability. At IIM Ranchi we believe that change has begun and there’s still a lot to be done and we are constantly contributing to making the future managers aware of sustainability and business implications on the silent stakeholder i.e. environment.