THE occurrence of two cyclones in consecutive seasons—Cyclone Nisarga in 2020 and cyclone Tauktae in 2021—is highly unusual for the west coast of India but fits in with the warnings of experts.
The India Meteorology Department has indicated that rising sea temperatures could mean that the west coast will see annual cyclones. The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has said that the surface temperature of the Arabian Sea has risen by 1.2 to 1.4 °C over the past 40 years. This, it says, can increase wind speeds by 5 per cent and result in cyclones and storm surges.
For reasons not yet fully known, the Indian Ocean is warming faster than other seas. The Arabian Sea, where the average temperature so far has been 24 to 25 °C, saw a dramatic rise during Tauktae’s passing. When the cyclone passed Goa the sea temperature was measured at 30 to 31 °C, which increased the wind speed from 80 to 100 kilometres/hour and it further picked up speed to 175 kmph as it rammed past Mumbai. Classified as “extremely severe”, Tauktae at its peak had a one-minute sustained speed of 220 kmph.
Waves as tall as four metres were generated as it swept past Ratnagiri even though it was some 100 km out at sea. The damage from both cyclones has been well documented, but what has been glossed over is the protective role of mangroves during extreme maritime weather.
How does a mangrove forest protect the coast from a cyclonic onslaught?
Mangrove trees live on the boundary between land and sea. They have laterally spreading roots with attached vertical roots that anchor them. The whole plant from the roots to the branches and the canopy absorbs the shock of storm surges.
They act as barriers to flood waves through factors such as bottom friction, tree density and the overall width of the mangrove forest. The roots of mangrove trees retain sediments and stabilise the soil of the intertidal region. Many studies have shown that up to 60 per cent of the wave force is dissipated by the first 100 m of mangroves along a coast.
A 2020 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America entitled “Mangroves shelter coastal economic activity from cyclones” by Jacob P. Hochard, Stuart Hamilton and Edward B. Barbier had significant findings.
Using spatially referenced data and statistical methods from 2000 to 2012, the authors tracked “the impact of cyclones on economic activity in coastal regions inhabited by nearly 2,000 tropical and subtropical communities across 23 major mangrove-holding countries [including India]”.
Their findings show that “direct cyclone exposure—i.e., within 100 km of the cyclone’s ‘eye’—has a permanent impact on long-run economic outcomes… in the absence of natural protections that buffer winds or reduce stormwater inundation.
Results suggest that cyclone exposure disrupts economic activity in coastal communities in the year of impact and in subsequent years following exposure. Higher elevation and wide mangroves, together, buffer this initial impact of storm exposure and enable communities to return to pre-exposure growth rates quickly thus avoiding long-term impacts on economic activity.
Despite their proven benefits, mangroves continue to be wilfully destroyed by official sanction for so-called development. The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services in Hyderabad found that the sea levels around India are rising at around 1.6 to 1.7 mm every year.
Mumbai, with a population of about 20 million people, lies at less than 15 m above sea level. Parts of the city are below or at mean sea level, making the city’s population vulnerable to climate change–related dangers.
One way to mitigate the risks is to nurture mangroves, natural wetlands and other coastal vegetation and natural rocky shores and sandy beaches. These are all armour for the coast.
A paper titled “The Global Flood Protection Benefits of Mangroves” by Pelayo Menéndez, Iñigo J. Losada, Saul Torres-Ortega, Siddharth Narayan and Michael W. Beck says that mangroves provide significant protection “from cyclones and the more regular (non-cyclonic) high wave and swell events.
However, cyclonic events are when damages are the greatest and mangroves offer the greatest benefit. With climate change the intensity and frequency of the largest events are likely to increase and thus the role of mangroves will therefore be even more relevant in future scenarios.” The paper says “countries such as Mexico, India and Vietnam” draw cyclone-protection benefits from mangroves.
Abundance of evidence
This is just one paper that has researched mangroves. There is an abundance of such hard evidence, but Mumbai’s treatment of its mangroves goes against all the scientific proof of their benefits. The island city had enormous mangrove forests until three decades ago.
In Mumbai, development has always been linked to reclamation, and this automatically spelt doom for mangroves. Towards the southern tip of the city, what used to be a huge mangrove forest is now a bus depot and a sprawling illegal slum.
The forest was destroyed before the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) laws came into existence in 1991 and at a time when trucks full of construction rubble would line up at night and brazenly dump their loads into the waters of the intertidal region. In this way Mumbai’s topography expanded into the sea.
After the CRZ laws were passed, mangroves continued to be killed but in a more insidious fashion. The inlets that bring in seawater, which is essential for the survival of mangroves, are blocked so that the plants wither and die. Then the dead mangroves are sold as firewood and the rubble dumping begins. In this way the city lost about 9,000 acres (one acre is 0.4 hectare) of mangrove between 1991 and 2001.
Infrastructure projects are a big threat to mangroves. To construct an overpass along a long stretch of Mumbai’s eastern seaboard in 2019, about 8,000 mangrove trees were killed by depriving them of seawater. When the work for Mumbai’s new international airport started in Navi Mumbai, satellite images showed that hundreds of acres of mangroves were destroyed.
The bullet train project, which will run between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, will claim at least 35,000 mangrove trees. More recently, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) is all set to clear-cut a one-hectare plot of mangroves to build an elevated station for the metro rail service.
In 2015, the Bombay High Court declared mangroves as protected forests, and soon after that the State government implemented a mangrove conservation plan to be carried out on government land. One happy outcome of this has been the notification of 1,036 ha of mangroves on government land as reserved forest and the handing of the same to the Forest Department.
This way mangrove land held by authorities such as the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and the MMRDA will finally get transferred to the Forest Department. The non-governmental organisation Vanashakti is fighting for this.
More than 3,000 ha of mangrove forest is supposed to have already been transferred to the Forest Department under orders from the Chief Conservator of Forests but this has not been done. Vanashakti has filed a public interest litigation petition seeking orders for the restoration of all mangrove forests destroyed illegally since 2005. Satellite imagery will be used to establish the before-after scenario.
In June, the Mangrove Cell of the Forest Department released a glossy publication on mangrove conservation called “Bio-Sentinels of Maharashtra”. The Mangrove Cell was established in 2012, and a year later a special unit called the Mumbai Mangrove Conservation Unit was created and headed by a Divisional Forest Officer.
Ecotourism involving local people and creating sustainable livelihoods are some of the conservation efforts of the cell, but the point is that the nemesis of the mangrove forest is politician-supported development and on this the cell is quiet.
There was a well-meaning plan to replant mangrove trees, but there is a strong reason why this will not work: developers and mangroves both vie for the coast, and it is well established that developers will win the game. All the above-mentioned infrastructure projects are ones that have been officially sanctioned but without a thought being given to the fact that Mumbai is on the red list of climate change–affected cities.
A 2019 report entitled “Flooded Future: Global vulnerability to sea level worse than previously understood” brought out by the American research institute Climate Central predicts that “many of the world’s coastlines are far lower than has been generally known and that sea level rise could affect hundreds of millions of more people in the coming decades than previously understood”.
The report says that Asia is particularly vulnerable because of the vast numbers of people who live along the coast. It goes on to say: “Based on sea level projections for 2050, land currently home to 300 million people will fall below the elevation of an average annual coastal flood. By 2100, land now home to 200 million people could sit permanently below the high tide line.” The report specifically mentions Kolkata as vulnerable in the Indian context, but environmentalists say that all coastal cities, including Mumbai, are at risk.
A working paper of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) written by Angela Picciariello, Sarah Colenbrander, Amir Bazaz and Rathin Roy entitled “The costs of climate change in India: a review of the climate-related risks facing India, and their economic and social costs” further corroborates this: “Looking towards the end of the century, global sea levels are projected to rise by at least 44-74 cm relative to the mid-1990s, excluding the risk of ice-sheet collapse.
Sea levels along the Indian coast are not forecast to rise quite as much as the average, increasing by 20–30 cm compared with current levels. Even so, this will have a severe impact on infrastructure and property, particularly in low-lying and densely settled cities such as Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.
It will also affect low-income rural communities that depend on coastal ecosystems for food and livelihoods, as the disappearance of coral reefs, degradation of mangroves and saline intrusion into the water table affect the productivity of agricultural land and natural ecosystems.”
Flooding is endemic to the low-lying areas in Mumbai and now with storm surges and cyclones the whole city is vulnerable. Mangroves are proven buffers against storm surge flooding. The ODI paper quoted a 2013 study in which Mumbai was ranked fifth in the world for flood-related losses. It quoted the catastrophic floods of 2005 in the city that killed 5,000 people and caused economic losses of $690 million. It says: “Floods will only get worse when combined with the heavier rains, higher sea levels and more severe storms associated with climate change.” With the risks of climate change increasing, saving Mumbai’s mangroves becomes more important than ever.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.
On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, which confirmed its 2016 finding of a decline in worldwide progress towards gender parity.
Over 2.8 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. As many as 104 countries still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and it is astonishing that a handful of countries still allow husbands to legally stop their wives from working.
Globally, women’s participation in the labour force is estimated at 63% (as against 94% of men who participate), but India’s is at a dismal 25% or so currently. Most women are in informal and vulnerable employment—domestic help, agriculture, etc—and are always paid less than men.
Recent reports from Assam suggest that women workers in plantations are paid much less than men and never promoted to supervisory roles. The gender wage gap is about 24% globally, and women have lost far more jobs than men during lockdowns.
The problem of gender disparity is compounded by hurdles put up by governments, society and businesses: unequal access to social security schemes, banking services, education, digital services and so on, even as a glass ceiling has kept leadership roles out of women’s reach.
Yes, many governments and businesses had been working on parity before the pandemic struck. But the global gender gap, defined by differences reflected in the social, political, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attitudes of men and women, will not narrow in the near future without all major stakeholders working together on a clear agenda—that of economic growth by inclusion.
The WEF report estimates 135 years to close the gap at our current rate of progress based on four pillars: educational attainment, health, economic participation and political empowerment.
India has slipped from rank 112 to 140 in a single year, confirming how hard women were hit by the pandemic. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two Asian countries that fared worse.
Here are a few things we must do:
One, frame policies for equal-opportunity employment. Use technology and artificial intelligence to eliminate biases of gender, caste, etc, and select candidates at all levels on merit. Numerous surveys indicate that women in general have a better chance of landing jobs if their gender is not known to recruiters.
Two, foster a culture of gender sensitivity. Take a review of current policies and move from gender-neutral to gender-sensitive. Encourage and insist on diversity and inclusion at all levels, and promote more women internally to leadership roles. Demolish silos to let women grab potential opportunities in hitherto male-dominant roles. Work-from-home has taught us how efficiently women can manage flex-timings and productivity.
Three, deploy corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the education and skilling of women and girls at the bottom of the pyramid. CSR allocations to toilet building, the PM-Cares fund and firms’ own trusts could be re-channelled for this.
Four, get more women into research and development (R&D) roles. A study of over 4,000 companies found that more women in R&D jobs resulted in radical innovation. It appears women score far higher than men in championing change. If you seek growth from affordable products and services for low-income groups, women often have the best ideas.
Five, break barriers to allow progress. Cultural and structural issues must be fixed. Unconscious biases and discrimination are rampant even in highly-esteemed organizations. Establish fair and transparent human resource policies.
Six, get involved in local communities to engage them. As Michael Porter said, it is not possible for businesses to sustain long-term shareholder value without ensuring the welfare of the communities they exist in. It is in the best interest of enterprises to engage with local communities to understand and work towards lowering cultural and other barriers in society. It will also help connect with potential customers, employees and special interest groups driving the gender-equity agenda and achieve better diversity.