It was a two-days of extremely knowledge-packed conference at Chandigarh. The delegates and speakers started arriving on 16th March evening, including Mr. M.B. Jayaram, Chairman Emeritus and Chief Mentor of PRCI, Mr. N.D. Rajpal, President of the National Executive, Mr. Krishna Mariyanka, Vice Chairman, amongst others.
The Conclave opened in Hotel Mountview on 17th afternoon at 3pm with the opening addresses by Mr. M.B. Jayaram, Mr. N.D. Rajpal and Conclave Chair C.J. Singh, providing an overview of the PRCI plans as well as the theme of the Conclave, "PR in the Challenging Times of Today". Renuka Salwan extended a warm welcome to the delegates on behalf of the host, PRCI Chandigarh Chapter.
Dr. Mathew Hibberd, Director at the University of Stirling, UK, spoke on the "Challenges of Change" and said that damage to an organisation's reputation is the biggest challenge for the communicators especially with 24x7 tv news channels and online media. He emphasised the need for more technical expertise and extensive PR education for the PR practitioners in order to be proactive and more importantly, to professionalise its practice.
"We need only the best brains to handle communication for organisations," he averred.
"Good Corporate Governance and PR" was the first plenary session in the afternoon that Deepak Jolly, Vice President Public Affairs, Coca Cola India, moderated. He had on the panel ABCI President Yogesh Joshi from Tata Steel, Renu Kakkar, Vice President Communication from Apeejay Group, and Dr. Pragnya Ram, Group Executie President, Corporate Communications from Aditya Birla Management Corporation.
Deepak Jolly deftly handled the session with incisive questions to the panelists that brought to the fore the demands on corporate communicators to the transparency, workplace ombudsman, code of business ethics, and CSR.
"Corporate communication is business of ideas, and a professional must be highly knowledgable about his/her organisation, the product/services, and the business environment in which it is operating," said Renu. Sharing her experience she emphasised that it is important for the communicators to be responsive with the minimum turn-around time to meet the deadlines of journalists, otherwise they would be bypassed for information. "The role of communicators is not to limit themselves to transactional communication which is more of an HR function, instead to focus on transformational communication", she added.
On the question of transparency and ethical business operations, Yogesh Joshi shared Tata's lone initiative way back in 1991 when it started publishing social audit report as a part of the annual report so as to communicate with all stakeholders, as well as institutionalise a process of establishing a strict code of business conduct in the group companies.
Dr. Pragnya Ram affirmed Aditya Birla's groups similar efforts of publishing its first report on Code of Business Conduct and now it also has an ombudsman to ensure its compliance.
How good it would do to make CSR mandatory for the corporates, as has been practiced in countries like Japan, and now India is also thinking about it? Dr. Ram underlined the need for such initiative to engage corporate in nation-building since the government alone can handle the vast plethora of socio-economic problems of the people. Yogesh Joshi reiterated the Tata Group's long history of CSR about which it chose to be silent, and so had been Coca Cola India's similar initiatives through its foundation 'Anandana', said Deepak Jolly,
All agreed to have mandatory percentage of net profits of a corporate designated for CSR activities.
