The name’s ‘Ajay Kapur’ and ‘Ambuja’ are synonymous with one another. Cutting his teeth in the cement business as the Executive Assistant to Narotam Sekhsaria, over a period of 19 years Ajay Kapur worked his way up to the position of MD & CEO – leading Ambuja Cements Ltd to become a major player in the Indian Cement market. Today he leads the cement business of the Adani Group, and Ambuja Foundation is fortunate to still have him as a Director – harnessing his extensive experience and business savvy to help grow our work.

“One valuable thing I learned in working closely with Mr Sekhsaria, which has served me well over time, is to always be real and genuine. Whatever is not ‘real’ will not survive. So this was the approach we took when we started doing CSR.

CSR is not something you must do because the government is asking you – we did it because it is good for the people and good for the company – it was a win-win. With a very clear motive of goodness, we found that doing good CSR endeared us to both the community and also the government.

In the beginning it was more of a need because we started in Gujarat close to the coast and salinity was an issue. Villagers weren’t that keen to have a cement company come into their paddy fields and take over their lands. The Government was also asking how we were going to look after the local stakeholders. We realized soon that the best way to go about it was to genuinely help them improve the concerns and issues that they faced, mainly in terms of water, agriculture and employment – these were desperate needs. And we did improve these issues, significantly. So much so, that the goodwill we created with the community from that, and so much other work, continues to serve us today.

These data points also came in very handy when we went to the Ministry of Environment & Forestry to grant us permits to set up our plants in other rural areas – they could see we were doing ‘real’ work, which really helped our cause. In this way, the Ambuja Foundation name and goodwill has helped the ACL brand open and expand into so many new states. It has also helped on the Human Resources front in attracting good talent – a reputation was built.

I saw over time, that those fundamental values – being real & genuine - have remained embedded in the company and also in the team. It has endured a long period of time.

A Symbiotic Relationship …

One good thing we did as management in the early days, along with Ambuja Foundation was create a CSR Committee in each location where the Unit Head became the President of the Committee – for things to work on ground there needed to be buy in from ACL Unit Head. And we found that ACL often needed certain things from ACF and ACF often needed things from ACL. The two worked together beautifully like that.

A good example of that was in around 2006, after Holcim came in, and as a company we started focusing on alternate fuels to fuel the furnaces at our plants. A suggestion came in

from Ambuja Foundation - can we use our village connect and get more and more biomass from farmers to do that?

We worked closely with Ambuja Foundation and realized that sourcing biomass from farmers was not an organized thing and farmers were either burning it in their fields, or being shortchanged by selling it to local brick manufacturers. ACF helped us formalize a set up with the local Farmer Producer Company, for sourcing of biomass.

From CSR to Sustainability …

Another good thing that stemmed from the Foundation was that in 2011-12 we started speaking with Harvard Business School and asked them to look at our CSR – they looked and came back and said, “You’re doing great work in CSR, but you need to work on overall ‘sustainability’ in a much more cohesive manner. Thus we went on to create a Sustainability Committee from CSR Committee where other departments like mining or environment also got involved. Even today, both ambuja foundation and the environment team work closely together.

And then we invited various relevant consultants to help us shape our sustainability approach and also to measure impacts. Ambuja got DNV-GL an internationally renowned external certification body to comprehensively evaluate our water management status and engaged with KPMG to measure our score from our investment.

We then went on to invite KPMG Netherlands to understand where we stood and provide a roadmap for the future. And that’s when the True Value Model was designed jointly measuring the pluses and minuses, not only of the business, but also measuring our social and environmental value as well. For the Foundation this helped understand the improvement of work needed in livelihoods, women empowerment, health and also in water - both within the fence and beyond the fence. The model is today being widely recognized and KPMG is using it for its other clients as well.

Ambuja also started participating in the DOW Jones Sustainability Index in 2012. When we put in our entry, the work we did on water, skilling, women and overall impact on society helped a lot in improving our scores. In 2016 we came into the Top 10, and when I left company in 2019 we hit number 5 worldwide! I know we did many other things in the company, but one big brownie point towards that when we measured our water positivity - in the first year ACL was 2 times water positive, within a few years it was 5 times and today the company is 8 times water positive.

This kind of community work really helped us get positioned as a sustainability champion, and as a business leader, this gave a lot of value.

The Future for Ambuja Foundation…

What has worked well for Ambuja Foundation was that it was built on the same philosophy and ‘business model’ as the company – at ACL, when we were born we were in 1 location,

and today we are in 38 locations, and today are one of the top 10 companies in the cement industry.

The business model as we expanded has always remained at the core – today we have everything in place that a global organization in our space would have. 10 years back we would have been very happy if we touched 200 crores – and since we have been able to achieve that, today as active board members we further challenge ourselves to aspire to 1000 crores – this would enable us to do so much more good work! We can become one of the pioneers in water, and training and development – enabling India, from support of its rural markets, to cross a Trillion rupee economy. That is my hope and dream for the Foundation.

The good thing today is that we are not reliant on just one anchor organization, which was ACL in the past. Today we have got 2 -3 times support from other corporates and stakeholders which diversifies our funding base and, in many ways, strengthens us.

Going forward to 1000 crores we will become very complex and big, therefore we need to continue strengthening the business model but also invest more heavily in areas like technology and digitized systems which will play a pivotal role in helping us navigate the future.

It’s been a wonderful journey so far – when you talk about the foundation you’re in the different mode and feel very good about it. And of course, when you become passionate about something, you become a walking Brand Ambassador! You can’t talk about cement all day long - the Foundation gives us something much deeper and richer to talk about at the end of the day!”

Ajay Kapur 

Director, Ambuja Foundation

CEO, Cement Business

Adani Group