Nestle India increasing number of female employees; 42% of new hires in 2020 were women

FMCG major Nestle India is increasing the number of its women employees as part of its gender diversity efforts. Presently, around 23 percent of Nestle India's workforce are women, its Chairman and Managing Director Suresh Narayanan said on Monday.

"We moved a fair degree on this. When I came to Nestle India in 2015, at that time we were at about 15-16 percent. We have moved now to 23 percent," Narayanan told reporters at a virtual media roundtable. Nestle India, which currently operates eight plants in the country and will soon commission the ninth, employs over 7,700 people.

"That is not the end, we would like to do much better than this. And in fact last year in 2020, 42 percent of all the recruitment that we did within the company were women candidates and it is a trend that is continuing this year as well," Narayanan added. At Nestle's new plant in Sanand, Gujarat, which will manufacture its range of popular instant noodles Maggi, 62 percent of the employees would be female.

"One of the epitomes of diversity for the company would be getting commissioned in the next few weeks. Our factory in Sanand is almost near completion. 62 percent of the Sanand factory workforce would be women," he said. Nestle is investing around Rs 700 crore in the Sanand plant.

Besides, Narayanan said Nestle India has invested about Rs 300 crore so far on augmenting capacity of its existing plants. This is part of its earlier announced plans to invest Rs 2,600 crore in the next three-four years. Nestle India has also submitted proposals for the government's Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for the food processing sector.

However, he did not divulge any details.