MR. RAKT RANJAN KALYAN
(Secretary Cum Executive Director)
I feel so humble to announce that CDOT has completed 22 years of operation. I extend my sincere gratitude and congratulate all our team members who work relentlessly to achieve the goals of CDOT. I take pride and satisfaction in the fact that despite the rough weather and tough path, we are working and reaching millions of people across India and providing them transparent financial services. I thank all of the executive committee members who have supported and helped in building strategies and paving a way to become meaningful to the community; and have been partners in achieving our common goal. We have always tried to be meaningful to the community and unless we have a vision and mission, it is impossible to work.
COVID gave us a new challenge. It was a global suffering and we suffered in the same way. The whole mechanism stopped and it was a difficult time. But we survived without retrenchment and everyone received their salary. I am thankful to the team for their understanding and continuous work to serve the community. We have a team of warriors to reach anywhere and everywhere. Corona also taught us to adopt new working techniques. We now work on intranet and have improved the efficiency of the staff to work from home.
Financial Inclusion is the buzz word these days, but it is also very responsible work when we decentralize the financial distribution and services. Our endeavor in this field has established our name as we are working with nationalized banks and RRB to reach the mass. Our performance has been excellent and we hardly reported any fraud in providing the services. Our bank partners also supported us and we enhance the standard of our work every day.
Our financing for sanitation work has really achieved a great height where we supported to build 8000 toilets and lent out livelihood loans. It gives us immense satisfaction to see that there is a change in sanitation behavior and people are using toilets in rural areas. It has certainly increased the health standard and the income level of poor people. The portfolio has been excellent and the demand is high. But the problem is that there is still no proper supply of funds.
Post-Covid, there was a need for health awareness, especially in rural areas. There was a new requirement in terms of health and health related products because of the damage the Coronavirus had caused. In the villages, people had to be taught the basics of Covid- appropriate behavior, and in this regard, we started our Community Health Facilitator program where our CHFs were health service providers. We are elated to say that we were able to create a different kind of model addressing not only Covid, but also the financial requirements of the people. The program is in its nascent stage and in the coming years, it is going to be a huge support mechanism for the community with women in the forefront.
The organization has consistently worked towards raising the standards of its operations, adding new dimensions, new faculty and making the programs more dynamic and relevant. The striving for excellence has spread throughout all our endeavors in an extremely competitive world. As a result, CDOT has been able to carve out a niche for itself for its work in the development sector.
Our training program for youth has had tremendous response and our new ventures in solar and e-commerce are taking shape. Green energy is the need of the hour and this encouraged us to venture into the field of renewable energy. We are educating people and creating demands for the use of solar energy as it is sustainable and eco-friendly. During 22 years of operations, CDOT has represented a positive growth rate. CDOT has tightened its operation to meet the necessity of the organization and enforced on the multitasking of the staff.
Last but not the least, I thank all the funding agencies, banks, financial institutions, development partners and people associated with CDOT for believing and having faith in CDOT. Our aim is to hold the leading torch and to become the pioneers in all aspects of development. I hope in the coming years we will set new milestones which can in turn strengthen poor families and empower women. I thank all the women who are with us and want to help as much as possible in improving their income and quality of life.
As a development institution CDOT always take holistic approach of development. Our vision is to reach the people with multiple products as per their requirement. We started working on financial inclusion probably we are among the first few organizations in this sector. Financial inclusion is one area where 360-degree services related to financial services is delivered to clients. We started working in this field from very beginning and now serving to 5 million clients across 6 states. We faced many problems at initial stage but as technology improved now it is real big thing has been created with huge network of BC agents providing all possible kind of services to untouched rural and urban mass. Now all kind of credit is also being proposed through BC network. During COVID period also BC agents worked very bravely and acted as true warriors.
COVID-19 given us a lot of learning. We learnt and converted this into making the organization more efficient and effective. At one stage where every where lock down but we kept on working and developed many inhouse software to operate more efficiently. It helped us to learn working from home and better control and deliveries. CDOT capitalized the opportunity and improved the deliverables to communities.
With a workforce of 200 people that totally depends on revenue was a big challenge for us but we worked kept giving salaries and other things and very smoothly came out. So, lock down opened a new diaspora for us to operate. CDOT believe in delivering meaningful services, our work in skilling the youth and providing loan for sanitation and creating hyper local market has been excellent initiatives and we are delivering best and our team has always been stood behind the cause.
After 20 years of our operation we are fresh full of energy to deliver more and more in rural and urban areas. With our effective work force and also alumni of CDOT has proved that CDOT is capable of handling the things in effective manner. We have young team mixed with experienced people forms a dynamic team.
In coming days, we are working to be more technology driven organization and we are developing software to address the need of the community. We are venturing into rural market, livelihood, training, housing and MSME finance. Creating platform for this.
At last I am thankful to all associated with CDOT for making the institution for great importance. I am thankful to staff and financers who always believed in CDOT. In coming days, we will come out with many more feathers to our cap. Thanks again.
-R.R.Kalyan
