Essel Group celebrates 90th anniversary: Highlights of Dr Subhash Chandra's speech

New Delhi: Essel Group celebrated its 90th anniversary with pomp and vigour on Sunday. President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were among the guests at the function held at the sprawling Indira Gandhi Stadium here.

Here are the highlights of Dr. Subhash Chandra's speech at the event:

# 40,000-strong Esselites powering the group to fullfill its vision. It has six-and-a-half lakh shareholders in addition to scores of well-wishers in India and abroad.

# Today, Zee News and Zee Entertainment have their presence in 172 countries with over 120 crore viewership.

# We have launched many pioneering projects in the country and also made them successful.

# One motivation behind our success is my grandfather Jagannath Goenka's counsel: Never be afraid of difficulties and never compromise on your promise and honesty.

# These are two motivational quotes alone helped us climb up and registered success in six of the nine projects.

# We have had many challenges in the last 90 years of Essel Group.

# Our projects have been planned and designed with an eye on social empowerment.

# Power thefts have been a major concern, but we have managed to bring down the losses from 39 percent to a single digit in Bihar. In the near future, we hope to expand our power supply to 50 cities and 20-25 thousand villages.

# Municipal solid waste has been a major concern in cities. We also plan to work in this area as part of our prime minister's Swaatch Bharat initiative. We have already signed MoUs with the municipal corporations in 20 cities and the work would soon start. This would be our another milestone when completed.

# Our waste-to-energy plant in Madhya Pradesh's Jabalpur town has been a success. The plant is pollution-free.

# We also have plans for housing for poor. Our Asha 2022 initiative is a low-cost, affordable housing scheme. However, the work is still in progress. Asha means Affordable Shelter and Houses for All.

# One of another future initiative is "armybehindarmy". As part of this initiative, we plan to highlight and promote the causes of armymen's wives through our organisation.

# Our Saarthi initiative is aimed at social upliftment of people through education, health, women empowerment and social justice. We have launched two pilot projects in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The initiative also endeavours to provide reservation for poor students in private schools.