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L’oréal stands in solidarity with India’s fight against Covid
Mumbai: To address the acute shortage of oxygen being faced by India in combating the Covid2019 pandemic, L’Oréal has lent its financial support to the French government’s initiative to provide oxygen generators, liquid oxygen containers and specialised respirators to the country. In addition, the global cosmetic brand is working with a network of NGOs across India, including GiveIndia, United Way Mumbai, Hemkunt Foundation, ActionAid Association, the Akshay Patra Foundation etc to supply critical oxygen equipment, medical supplies, food, education and hygiene kits across the country.
L’Oréal will provide oxygen concentrators and cylinders to hospitals in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab and distribute over 100,000 units of sanitisers to government hospitals, police forces, municipal corporations, and those on the frontline of the pandemic across the country. The company said it will also give care packages to approximately 2000 nurses who have become the primary caregiver and family to many.
With schools closed indefinitely, underprivileged children have not had access to education or food provided by schools. To aid their requirements, L’Oréal has partnered the Akshay Patra Foundation to provide 4,000 food and education kits for children. As women have been amongst the most severely impacted by the pandemic, L’Oréal is working with Action Aid India to provide livelihood training and infrastructure support, there by empowering them to restart their livelihoods.
L’Oréal India managing director Amit Jain said, “We are deeply concerned with the severity of the second wave of the pandemic and committed to working closely with the government and our NGO partners to support the country’s collective efforts to fight the crisis.”
L’Oréal employees will also be contributing toward Covid relief to an NGO of their choice via the fundraising platform GiveIndia.
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Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
