Cummins Inc. has won first place in the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship Film Festival for its piece on a corporate responsibility project to bring power to a remote Indian village. The award was announced during the International Corporate Citizenship Conference in Minneapolis.
“It’s fantastic to see this outstanding project get recognized in this way,” says Carole Casto, director of community engagement, who narrated the video on the village of Padarwadi. “The competition was extremely strong. Our Cummins India employees should be very proud.”
Thirty-six companies submitted three-minute videos in the third annual competition. Other finalists included Allstate, Avon, Dassault Systems, Ernst & Young, FedEx, Marathon Oil, Southwest Airlines, Tyco and UST Global.
Padarwadi’s 10 households are connected to the nearest town by a long, narrow path that twists up a mountain. The path isn’t wide enough for vehicles; Padarwadi is reachable only on foot. Hundreds of times per year, residents had to carry the rice they grew up that path to a mill in the town. They long dreamed of building a rice mill in the village, but that was impossible without a power source.
Cummins India engineers have developed a power generation system that runs on oil from the seeds of three indigenous trees found near the village. Working with village leaders and a local charitable group, Cummins employees disassembled the generator, a rice mill and the machinery to extract oil from the seeds, and helped carry it all down the path to Padarwadi, where it was reassembled for use.
