Safety

Safety continues to be a focus and a subject matter of continuous improvement. During the year we deployed external consultant like E.I DuPont de Nemours and British Safety Council, to help upgrade our safety performance. The Loss Time injury frequency Rate (LTIFR) during the year continued to show an improving trend.

The LTIFR for 2008-09 at 1.67 translates to reduction of 13% over the previous year and over 56% during the last three years.

We regret to inform that the total number of fatalities this year was 22, which is unacceptable. These accidents have been thoroughly investigated and corrective measures put in place. As a first step DuPont and British Safety Council were engaged to conduct a safety assessment across all locations and their recommendations are in the process of being implemented.

Empowering Communities

Our community engagement has grown as the mainstay of our business. This year was a period of retrospection and introspection for the Company, in understanding the evolution of our relationship with our Communities over the last four years and the direction the Company now needs to take, to strengthen and deepen it.

Our vision is to ‘enhance the socio economic lives of communities where we operate’. We firmly believe with an understanding of each others needs and opportunities, we the company, government, communities and civil society, are striving collectively to bring long-term qualitative developments in the communities.

The outreach of our programmes encompasses more than 2.5 million people in India and Zambia. We are presently engaged in more than 427 villages. This commitment is demonstrated on the ground by the team of 454 grass root level functionaries and 96 professional and subject matter specialists who drive the initiative.

We run 937 Anganwadi Centers (Child Care Centers) in partnership with the government’s Integrated Child Development Scheme centers at HZL, Lanjigarh, and BALCO reaching out to 30,347 children. The program consists of health care and nutrition supplements, including addressing maternal and child mortality, and education through the play way method to control dropouts and ensure continuity in education, Plans are underway to scale the project to reach out 0.5 million children over 2-3 years time frame.

Currently we run 6 centralized kitchens under the Midday Meal Scheme (MDM) operational at Rajasthan reaching out to 180,000 children in partnership with the Government of Rajasthan and Naandi Foundation. Work is in progress at for setting up a kitchen each at Lanjigarh and Korba reaching out to about lakh children in partnership with the respective State Governments and Naandi Foundation. Under a 5 year plan we will set up of 31 MDM Kitchens at 10 different locations in rural India catering to 1 million children.

This year we have partnered with 82 civil society organizations which brought an expanded dimension towards achieving the project goals. The competency sharing lead to successful capacity building of communities and constructive and constant dialogue. We were also recipients of several Sustainable Development awards and accreditations that our Group companies have received over the past year. Highlighting a few:

• 2nd Best employer in India and amongst top 25 employers in Asia by Hewitt, Associates HZL
• Asian, 2008, HZL by Asian Institute of Management
• International Safety Award 2008 from British Safety Council, Debari Smelter, HZL, BALCO and Copper Smelter at SIIL, Tuticorin
• RoSPA Gold Award 2009 from Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents, UK, Debari Zinc Smelter, HZL
• Golden Peacock Award for Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility Award, BALCO, 2008
• Golden Peacock Award for Corporate Social Responsibility Award Reporting, Vedanta Resources, 2008.

We continue to use the Global Reporting Initiative’s G3 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines to develop this report. This year we also reported on additional indicators of the G3 guidelines and the GRI Draft Metal and Mining supplement. The information within this section is an outline of our policies, systems and performance and will be detailed further in the stand alone Sustainable Development Report. The key information is being independently verified by KPMG, India.