Vedanta Aluminium, the largest aluminum producer in India has hired seven transgender employees in its subsidiary Bharat Aluminium Company (BALCO).
The company said in a statement, “Four of them have been engaged in forklift operations at cast house and three others in security function at Chhattisgarh-based BALCO.”
Vedanta has been working extensively toward building a diverse workforce, attracting high-potential women professionals to join its ranks.
In March, the company also embarked upon the mission in expanding into the LQBTQIA+ talent pool, which is yet to find acceptance in the mainstream and structured corporate world.
To ease their transition from the fringes of society to smart manufacturing plants, and help them evolve from semi-skilled people into professionals, the company has adopted a three-pronged approach, that includes:
Identification: BALCO worked with local NGOs and transgender community to conduct a skill mapping study and identify trans people with minimum required skills for working in a manufacturing industry.
Training: Post selection of such candidates, the company is taking them through an extensive training program aimed at honing the required skillsets, including soft skills and business knowledge.
Building an empathetic & inclusive environment: Parallelly, BALCO is also conducting gender-sensitization sessions for its workforce with respect to the social and psychological challenges of trans people, proper code of conduct and ways of working to build a cohesive and encouraging environment for all. This also includes ensuring required infrastructural augmentations.
Vedanta CEO – Aluminium Business – Rahul Sharma said, ”Our markets, customers, and businesses are diverse and complex. To match that, we believe in recruiting people with diverse points of view, experiences, skills, and education so that their business strategies are correspondingly well-rounded.”
He added, ”And hence, we are now casting our talent acquisition net wider and looking to attract competent and ambitious LGBTQIA+ people to our workforce, for merit has no gender.”
