Tata Steel to double women employees on its shopfloor to 10% by 2025

Tata Steel Tuesday said it is targeting to double the proportion of women working on its shopfloor to 10 percent of the total workforce by 2025.

The Tata group company has 5 percent of its overall 35,000 employees or about 1,750 women working on the shopfloor at present, a company official said.

In a statement, the company further said it will create more avenues for women to grow in the technical/ manufacturing domain.

In a fillip for the 2025 goal, the company has begun to include women working on the shopfloor in two additional shifts at the flagship Jamshedpur plant, which has helped the fairer sex be present in the factory between 6 am and 10 pm.

A company official explained that women have been on the shopfloor for many years, but used to work only in the general 9 am-5 pm shift.

Tata Steel had to make a slew of changes in the workplace in adherence of local rules in Jharkhand to help make it possible for women to work in shifts, he added.

These include conducting sensitisation sessions for the employees, set-up security systems, creating women role models as ambassadors and meeting families of women, the statement said.

After the efforts, 52 women are working on the shopfloor across different shifts at the coke plant and electrical repair shopfloor at its over a century old plant, it added.

"Going forward, we hope to expand this further to include more departments that will open-up for women," its vice president human resource management Suresh Dutt Tripathi was quoted as saying.

The Jharkhand plant has 20,000 workers, of which 1,300 are women. The women employees include 500 officers who are not on the shopfloor and 800 non-officers, including the 52, who man the shopfloor, the official explained.

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