Neerja Birla is defying taboos, one area at a time

OVER 75% OF Aditya Birla Education Trust’s (ABET’s) employees are women, in sharp contrast to the male-female ratio of most Indian workplaces. In fact, at ABET, women talk openly about stigmatised topics such as menstruation or menopause during meetings. “The men in our organisation are conditioned to freely discuss these topics with their women colleagues,” says Neerja Birla, chairperson and founder, ABET. Birla, who also features on Fortune India’s Most Powerful Women 2025 list, believes these are important conversations which have been buried under the table for too long, and need to be urgently mainstreamed. But isn’t it far easier for a woman-dominated organisation to have these conversations at ease? Does the male-dominated world at large even understand the challenges of menopause, leave alone mainstreaming it? That is exactly why one needs to educate organisations and leaders, Birla emphasises. “Not enough is spoken about menopause. It is a bigger taboo than mental health. Everyone talks about anxiety and depression; nobody talks about peri-menopause and menopause, or the difficulties women go through at this stage in life.” After making conversations around mental health acceptable not just in workplaces but also in rural India, Birla’s next bet is to make topics such as peri-menopause and menopause subjects of boardroom discussions. In fact, one often hears about the ‘leaky pipeline’ concept in the corporate world in the context of women exiting the workforce, especially when they are in their early-to-mid thirties. That’s the time most of them get married, have a family and their role as a caregiver takes precedence. The pipeline gets leakier when women in their mid-forties go through peri-menopause. And that, believes Birla, is the main reason why there aren’t too many women in leadership roles. “They think their productivity is dipping. The stress is unbearable and so they prefer to quit… There is a change going on in your body and it’s not something you are imagining, it’s really happening. Both women as well as organisations need to understand and validate that.” Be it making conversations around menstrual-, or mental health mainstream (through Ujaas and MPower), investing in high-quality teacher training (Aditya Birla Education Academy), or building inclusive spaces for the intellectually challenged (through The Aditya Birla Integrated School and Nalanda), Birla’s playbook has always been to pick up causes which bear a societal stigma, normalise conversations around them and then scale. Both MPower and Aditya Birla Education Academy, for instance, have been scaled nationally. LIVED EXPERIENCES: Birla’s mental health foundation, MPower, has touched 3.5 million lives to date. In the past year, mental health awareness and coping skills in India went up by 26%, with a 31% increase in individuals seeking help, she says. When the foundation was launched in 2016, mental health was a taboo. When Birla and her team of two psychologists (now a team of 400) reached out to schools, colleges and corporates to organise mental health awareness workshops, the answer was a firm no. Everyone felt it was a problem too personal to be discussed openly. “Those organisations which agreed for the workshops told us to drop the phrase ‘mental health’ from the title. But we didn’t agree. We said we are here to create awareness and break barriers and if we change the name then it would be against the very purpose.” Birla held on to her stand. She knew there was a crying need to support mental well-being since she had witnessed her older daughter going through serious challenges. “She went through a tough time and as a caregiver I had seen closely the challenges and stigma that one goes through if he/she has a mental health concern. I realised the gaps in treatment, the lack of understanding.” Being a caregiver wasn’t easy either. “I couldn’t even talk about it initially, people were not willing to listen, even those I was close to, didn’t understand. It was an isolating experience. That’s how MPower happened. I realised if I am able to put my own experiences and help and make it easier for others, why not.” In fact, most of Birla’s initiatives at ABET are an outcome of her lived experiences. “It didn’t begin as a pre-planned, structured thought,” she says. Her decision to start Aditya Birla World School came out of the realisation (when her children were at school) that the Indian education system was too textbook-oriented and the children seldom got a chance to follow their passions. She gave extra-curricular activities more weightage than textbooks. “As I interacted with more and more children, I realised children with learning disabilities were looked down upon as second-class citizens. That’s how TABIS [The Aditya Birla Integrated School] came up.” Ujaas, which is dedicated to advancing menstrual health awareness and access for adolescent girls and women across India, is spearheaded by Birla’s younger daughter, Advaitesha. The initiative has reached 1.7 lakh adolescent girls and women in Maharashtra. Through its initiative Period Sakhi, Ujaas is not just building menstrual health awareness, it is also making them [women] financially independent through sanitary reusable pad-making units run by women self-help groups. Over 63,000 menstrual pads have been produced by these units, generating ₹55 lakh in revenue. While Ujaas is still in its infancy, MPower has made inroads across the country. The scaling up surprisingly isn’t an outcome of corporates increasing their spends on mental well-being, but various government organisations such as the CISF and the Mumbai Police joining hands with MPower to solve mental health challenges of their employees. There are initiatives such as Project Samvedna (with the government of Maharashtra) which aims to address mental health issues in rural Maharashtra. Armed forces personnel are often prone to depression as the nature of their job keeps them away from families for months. As a result, death by suicides are rampant. Birla claims MPower’s involvement with the CISF in the last three years has resulted in a 40% reduction in suicide rates. “Under Project Samvedna in Maharashtra, we are building capacity, doing awareness workshops at the grassroot level and also training ASHA workers. We are screening people going to rural hospitals. We screen them, identify those who need intervention and then loop them back to the rural district hospital. We are building a data bank which will identify the gaps and say these are the number of psychologists we need to have in the system,” says Birla. This rural mental health programme is also being scaled in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. CORPORATE MINDSET: Running a business is all about building sustainable models and creating strategies and processes to scale them. Since the launch of ABET, Birla was clear she wouldn’t engage in cheque-book philanthropy. It has always been about making a difference and that could only happen by creating a structured approach. ABET, she says, has always been run as a start-up incubating novel and uncharted business ideas. “We learnt as we went along. It has been a difficult journey. MPower, for instance, was ahead of its time. The things that are now doing well didn’t do well then. We had to first build acceptance and then operationalise it.” Offering high quality, professional service was table-stakes. But for that one required a team of professionals. Getting the right people on board became a challenge because the general belief was that NGOs didn’t pay well. “We have a method to whatever we do — there’s an operating model, a strategy and we are clear where we want to focus. We are clear whether we want a particular initiative to be semi-funded, or make it a part of CSR [corporate social responsibility]. There is a thought process for everything,” she explains. ABET, Birla emphasises, undertakes only those projects that are scalable. “If we are doing something which is not scalable then it is a thought-through decision.” Fund-raising hasn’t been a cake-walk either. “The biggest challenge has been funding-raising. It may sound odd coming from me, but that’s the truth,” she smiles. Even though ABET is relatively established today, Birla says she is invariably asked why an organisation from the Aditya Birla Group is asking for funds. “ABET is CSR-driven, it’s not a philanthropic arm of the organisation. It’s an independent trust, so we need funds,” is her answer, always. The journey has been difficult, but Birla is seeing results — MPower’s mental health helpline has seen a 100% growth in inbound calls in the past year, a clear indication that more and more Indians are willing to seek help. She is particularly excited about Cope, MPower’s mental health programme rolled out in colleges. “We identify 25 students per college, who create a mental health club, Cope. We train them with our mental health first aid programme. They become the first point of contact. They offer peer-to-peer support and do three events in a year, where they normalise mental health,” explains Birla. But it is Project Masoom, which really stands out. The Dongri Children’s Home in the non-descript locality of Umerkhadi in Mumbai houses over 250 juvenile kids. Among them is 14-year-old Asha (name changed on request), who fled from Pune in order to escape from her mother who was conspiring to trade her with a sex worker. Besides being traumatised, Asha suffers from severe lack of trust. It’s been three months since she was rescued by the Mumbai Police from a railway station and her only confidant is the MPower counsellor who visits her twice a week. “It took me over two months to win her confidence, but now she is finally able to share what she is going through,” says the counsellor. MPower has partnered with the Maharashtra government and the women and child development ministry to offer help to child-care centres in the state. “When you work hand-in-hand, you are bound to see changes,” says Birla. But then, one can’t bring about change single-handedly. Collaborations matter.

Neerja Birla is defying taboos, one area at a time

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