Sheetal S Pai Kane, director of Acoustic Components Pvt. Ltd. was recently nominated as the chairperson of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s-Indian Women’s Network Goa (CII IWN). She is passionate about matters concerning the experiences and challenges of women professionals at work as well as the importance of creating gender parity in business and society. Business Goa sat down with Sheetal to learn more about her goals for the organisation and initiatives planned for the future.
What is the mandate for the IWN in Goa??
As of now, we are trying to work over the mandate. We have three different segregations which are Health and Wellness, Policy and Advocacy and Social Approach. Along with these three aspects and its verticals, we are trying to set up a platform for Goa where we can have leadership forums, professionals from the industry who come in and give a talk on women issues and enable them in overcoming various roadblocks that they may face at their workplace.
What is the prime focus of the organisation in your tenure?
My prime focus currently, is to get IWN settled in, after knowing that this is more of a re-launch, given that it didn’t work out the first time around. Now, I’m looking forward to establish a strong foundation for the IWN by having a number of members. When we started out, we had only five members, and now the membership has gone up to 20 plus. That, in its self, is a good sign that women are coming in to such organizations. Secondly, we are trying to see how we can get women to come in and talk about various, interesting subjects which are beneficial to women.
As a sister organisation of the CII, what national initiatives are you canvassing in the State?
In India, CII has four different regions. The Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western regions and the IWN is present in 14 states across India. There are also 5 zones and Goa falls under two of these zones. My agenda in this regard is to see whether we can have some relation or exchanges between different states, within the IWN’s existing network. The closest place to us is Kolhapur which has an IWN, Mumbai has a very strong IWN with a large number of members and I’m trying to work on an exchange program. In this exchange program I’m trying to see if women from different states in the industry can come here or we can go there and participate in exhibits and sessions held in these States. Once this works out, I want to try to work out something similar, internationally. We can get in women entrepreneurs from abroad and take them around the industry in Goa and work on women centric subjects.
What events/programs have you hosted to push ahead your focus area?
The basic idea right now for me is, to at least do one program a month in different areas. There are various kinds of sessions being held in different areas of interests. We had a session on stress management for women, wherein three different individuals from three different areas like yoga, fitness and a doctor from Manipal Hospital, spoke about the importance of leading stress free lives. Next, we had a session on healthy nutrition and good eating. We did one during IFFI, which was related to film making and film production where we had people coming in from the film fraternity, like actors, directors and producers. These speakers stressed on Goa being an interesting state, close to metros like Mumbai and Chennai, and how efficiently a state like ours can create an infrastructure for a film city. Very recently, we did a session on financial planning being simplified and then we had one on ‘Women Entrepreneurs-Making their mark’. Here we spoke about women entrepreneurs in Goa, on how they started and how they are now making their mark in the business world.
Tell us how you go about with your events and programmes with the team?
Like I said, we are a 5 month old baby and this team is learning to take baby steps, trying to find our footing and be stable. There are different individuals, like doctors, architects, professionals from various backgrounds, artists, someone in the manufacturing field, as well as a woman who has around 300 people working under her. We try our best to meet up once a month as everyone is busy working and schedules can be pretty tight. We do have a WhatsApp group though and we generally throw about ideas there and try to brainstorm. . Usually with the sessions happening once a month, we meet up during the sessions, and we plan the next move after one particular session is over. Someone always comes up with an idea and voices it out whether it’s an idea we should follow up on and we try to see that we get material from different fields – be it finance, from policy advocacy and health awareness. We have to keep things interesting. One of the sessions which we did on food and nutrition, we had a dietician who came in and spoke about dieting, eating healthy food and health in general. Another person came in and cooked up some pretty good dishes. These were healthy recipes which don’t require one to spend long hours in the kitchen and a healthy meal can be whipped up in minutes, which is nutritious and healthy as well. This is very important for working women who have less time on their hands and are also health conscious.
What are the plans on the anvil?
Right now, whatever we have done was focused on the urban area. We are trying to get into the rural areas. At one of the sessions, I met members of a Self Help Group from Bicholim. We’d like to start from there. Whatever we are doing in the city, we want to take it across to villages and benefit them. We would like to take a few people with us and we are trying to build on a leadership aspect. Many women in these rural areas are into making pickles, masalas and we would like to try out various ways in which we could promote their products. The other program we are working on is called ‘Campus to Career’ where we will be going to Universities and undergraduate schools, and try to get to know at what age girls drop out from schools, or colleges and in which way we can be of assistance to them. At the University level, we will try to see if we can put these girls in an internship program and get them employed in factories and industries.
We are tied up with the CII and the CII is an organisation which has manufacturing units and industries linked to them. We would like to tie up with self help groups, many of whom have already approached us and see how we can create a synergy. Maybe once a week or once a month we can go to these areas and take a doctor if it’s a health related issue to do a free health check up and the like. Even if IWN is not a part of it, these projects keep on happening like a sort of a pilot project that will be ongoing and continuous, which will benefit these women on a long term basis. There will be a lot of entrepreneurs in these areas but they do not know how to make the right entrance. So we are thinking of having a mentor and mentee kind of program where we will take charge with our people from the CII IWN and they could try to channelize their strengths in the right direction. Suppose an entrepreneur comes with a new product and she has difficulties in launching it like there may be certain rules and regulations that have to be met up with, we can step in and facilitate the process in this regard
