Adani Foundation at ACC Thondebhavi Helps Ten Women Move Beyond Seasonal Farming and Build Own Business

Bengaluru : ACC, the cement and building materials company of the diversified Adani Portfolio, along with the Adani Foundation, through its CSR initiatives at ACC Thondebhavi, is helping women in rural Karnataka build livelihoods that do not disappear when the harvest season ends.

For ten women in Thondebhavi, the agricultural calendar had always dictated everything. When there was work on the farms, there was income. When the season ended, both did. It was a cycle that left little room for savings, less room for planning and no room at all for the kind of financial confidence that comes from knowing the next month will look after itself.

Adani Foundation looked at this group of women and saw not a welfare case but an enterprise waiting to happen. The Amara Stree Shakti Sangha was formed, bringing the ten women together as a collective. They were trained in paper plate manufacturing which is a skill with clear, immediate and local demand and provided them with a paper plate making machine along with the kind of sustained handholding support that turns a training into a functioning business rather than a forgotten workshop.

The women did the rest. They identified their customers – local shops, caterers, community events and began supplying regularly. The business found its footing quickly. Today the group generates a collective monthly income of around Rs. 40,000. Household savings have grown. And perhaps more importantly, the financial confidence of each member has grown with them.

What Adani Foundation at ACC Thondebhavi has built here is not just a micro-enterprise. It is a group of ten women who no longer wait for the farming season to begin before they can plan their lives. That shift – from dependence to agency, from seasonal to sustainable, is exactly what the initiative set out to create, and exactly what it has delivered.