‘Every second recruit at Mercedes-Benz India must be a woman’: Vyankatesh Kulkarni

March 8 is celebrated as International Women’s Day. Vyankatesh Kulkarni, who took charge as the Executive Director and Head of Operations for Mercedes-Benz India in May 2022, says the luxury carmaker is focused on achieving the 20% diversity target across its entire workforce, which is increasingly seeing enhanced women participation with the right policies, training, and infrastructure interventions taken by the carmaker being the key enablers.

When it comes to gender diversity, we started on this journey from CY2022 onwards, and this was one of the key agendas on our list. Towards this cultural transformation, so far, we have inducted 75 women among the 500 blue-collared shopfloor workers at the Mercedes-Benz India assembly line.

We maintain our goal of achieving 20% diversity in our workforce, right from the people on the shopfloor, all the way up to the management. To achieve this, we are taking various initiatives, for instance, from the recruitment phase itself, wherein we have several positions dedicatedly marked for women. We are internally keeping a target that every second recruit must be a woman. Therefore, we are driving these efforts from the top.

We started out with structured training programmes for both women and men operators. Programmes such as POSH (Prevention Of Sexual Harassment) training programme were carried out.