Welcome to The Helix by me, Sowmy VJ. I am a Consulting Partner with a leading firm in London, focusing on financial stability. I realised that I could use my experience to find solutions to much larger problems in the world, and hence started working on programmes to reduce inequality.
My first awareness of inequality and how it deprives people, was when I was part of a small project in the year 2005, to rehabilitate remand prisoners in India. They were awaiting trial for very trivial offenses, but there is significant stigma to accept them back into society. We helped by counselling them, bringing them legal assistance, and finding them a livelihood. It gave me immense happiness to find that I have been able to make a positive change in someone’s life.
After that, I used to volunteer my time helping Indian labourers in the Middle East, in finding help for employment, or livelihood problems. Again, the contentment that I derived out of this was enough for me to dedicate my life to this purpose.
While looking at problems, I also looked at how capitalism in its current form isn’t oriented towards creating a fairer world. Having said that, there are many companies that are capitalist in nature, but work towards creating a fairer world. One such example is the Tata Group. I became a shareholder of Tata group company shares, with the sole intention of understanding how it is possible for a large corporate to dedicate a substantial part of their profits to the communities that they depend on, that too for 150+ years. Since then, I have only been buying more of it, and haven’t sold any. In 2015, I had the honour of taking up employment with Tata Consultancy Services, several years after I became a shareholder.
I currently work on projects ranging from sustainability (manufacturing, packaging, and supply chain), livelihood re-development, homelessness, access to education, access to health care, fair application of law & justice, as well as the most critical 0–6 age group of our future citizens.
The joy of using technology to impact thousands of lives is immense, and I’d like to share that joy with other like minded people.
Over the last 15 years I realised a growing trilemma between policies that sets political social, and economic direction, the risk of inequality, and the inevitable need to improve the resilience of the communities, affected by the policy.
One of the gargantuan problems facing us, and threatening our future generations, is climate change. I call the risk of climate change, an ‘unfair risk’….reason being that the pollution caused by the rich countries, leads to deprivation and loss of livelihood for the poorest of the poor.
First of all, today’s asset prices, don’t take the risk of climate change into account. A combination of reasons exist for this….first of all, the polluter thinks it is a problem for the society at large to manage….not mine. Secondly, the impacts of climate change are of much longer duration and hence the polluter may not exist in business that long, to be sued for it. Thirdly, what isn’t measured, isn’t managed…nobody asked the polluter to measure. Disclosures are voluntary and very ambiguous. In a number of cases, the promises being made in the disclosures, show no progress on the ground.
I’d like to work on this, along with like minded people to tackle:
· Data challenges that limit the pricing of climate change risks into asset prices
· Policy and investment trends, aligned towards a longer term fairer world
· Policy and divestment from dirty/polluting assets, and shift towards more sustainable practices
· Solutions to the social problems that exist today, as well as those that are created by either the investment or divestment trend.
We’ll talk about these, and much more in the Helix.
