MG Motor India targets 50% female employees by the end of 2023

Last week, MG Motor India announced that it had crossed the 100,000-sales milestone in less than three years after launching its first car, the Hector. “For us, 100,000 MG cars on the road is not just a number, but we have crossed several important milestones along the way,” Gaurav Gupta, Chief Commercial Officer, MG Motor India, told FE. “We’ve launched four models, and with each of them a unique set of technology.”

Hector was India’s first Internet car; The ZS EV was India’s first pure electric connected SUV; Gloster was India’s first autonomous driving (Level 1) premium SUV; And the Astor was India’s first autonomous (Level 2) medium-sized SUV.

Gupta adds that what is more important here is that during the Covid-19, such technologies were tried and tested and brought to Indian roads with the shortage of semiconductors and the challenges surrounding logistics.

Women’s participation
But one unique area that car manufacturers have consciously focused on is the participation of women in the workforce since its inception, both at its manufacturing plants in Holo, Vadodara, Gujarat, and at its head office in Gurgaon, Haryana, India. “We started with women, about 30% of our workforce across India. Today, we are at 37% (probably the highest in the industry), ”said Gupta. “Our goal is to take it to 50% by the end of 2023.” This participation of women not only in office or desk jobs, but also on the store floor (which was traditionally a male-dominated area). “We have women who are painters and welders, and they are building world class cars,” Gupta added. “When nature is at 50:50, how can art employ less women than that?”

It is often argued that there is an equally talented man and a woman for every role in the world. But due to decades of social norms, women could not be trained like men in certain cases. “Trained women exist; You just have to be more discriminating with the help you render toward other people, “said Gupta. “We tried that; We have trained them well enough to play a better role than many men.

At the same time, we had no prejudice against men just to reach our goals. ” MG Motor India is building a brand new mass-market electric car that will be priced between Rs 10-15 lakh, and will be launched by the end of FY23. “Our women workforce will be instrumental in building that new age electric car,” she said.