Sustainability Report 2020-21 - Click here to access the report
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Economic

People Development & Human Rights

Our world-class crop and seed solutions have their beginnings in our people. We believe in considering everything we do through the lens of how it will affect them, and our organisational culture – always prioritising wellness, learning, fairness, and inclusivity.

Human Rights

Our commitment to human rights is built into everything we do – from our interactions with farmers, supply chain operations, training, to our marketing and business operations. In all actions we uphold the principles set out by international and regional Human Rights organisations and adhere to the laws of the countries we operate in.

Our policies are steadfast in opposing child labour, discrimination, non-freedom of association and forced labour. These policies extend not only to our employees but also to our customers, contractors, suppliers, and all other third-party business associates.
We are in alignment with:
  • Universal Declaration of Human Rights
  • UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights
  • The International Labour Organization’s (ILO’s) core conventions
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Code of Conduct

It describes in detail the ethics that the company, its stakeholders and workforce need to embrace in their daily functioning

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Supplier Code of Conduct

This code applies to all our business affiliates worldwide – suppliers, contractors, contract manufacturers, and joint-venture partners with whom we share a contractual and commercial relationship. It showcases best employment practices, shunning child labour, forced labour, abuse, harassment and discrimination

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Human Rights Policy

The policy enumerates the risks of human rights violations that may arise due to our widespread business and collaborations with multiple third-party associates. UPL forbids child labour, protects labour rights, support diversity and non-discrimination, freedom of association, and safety. The policy encompasses not only our employees but also our customers, contractors, suppliers, and all other third-party business

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Child Labour Policy

The policy prevents use of any kind of child labour within any of our premises, offices, factories, or warehouses. This extends to our suppliers and growers too.

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Governance and protection of human rights

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  • Human rights violations, if any, are arbitrated by a committee made up of cross functional leadership and headed by our Chief Human Resources Officer. The committee periodically reviews and updates our Human Rights policies and practices. They also oversee the organising of awareness programs, trainings, campaigns, workshops, seminars, etc. for various stakeholder groups

  • To ensure we practice what we learn, regular inspections and surprise audits are conducted at our plants, warehouses, offices, and other strategic third-party locations. With a zero-tolerance approach toward human rights violations, any business partners found guilty face an investigation and may find their association with us permanently terminated

  • For an individual to report a concern, we have a robust whistle blower policy and a global grievance mechanism for any stakeholders to raise and resolve issues or potential violations

  • All our stakeholders can connect via grievance@upl-ltd.com to report any potential or ongoing concerns. We ensure that reporting a concern will have no action or reprisal rebound on the individual raising it

With Human Rights Assessment and the associated due diligence being sensitive matters, at UPL, we have set in place mechanisms, regional and international commissions to act on any instances of violation swiftly, and with all necessary confidentiality.

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Our assessment methodology involved pre-planning and scoping across major locations of our operations and third parties in Gujarat, India. This consisted of administering questionnaires, discussions, site-rounds, documentation, and background checks among various internal & external stakeholders:

  • Senior management

  • Cross functional employee in different cadres

  • Contractor in skilled, semi-skilled & unskilled categories

  • Security staff

  • Third party manufacturers

This cross-hierarchy, broad-based information gathering helped us identify and map our Human Rights landscape – i.e. the nature and extent of potential risks linked to our activities. We focused on 8 major aspects of human rights:

  • Child Labour

  • Discrimination

  • The rights of Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining

  • Fair Remuneration

  • Fair Working Hours

  • Occupational Health and Safety

  • Bonded Labour

  • Workers’ Involvement and Protection

This consists of:

  • Strengthening existing procedures and systems

  • Revising and upgrading existing policies and assessment manuals

  • Increasing vigilance at every level of the company

  • Improved internal control measures

  • Increased proficiency in audits and third-party onboarding

For specific and complicated issues an action plan is devised with a timeline for implementing the recommendations.
Our control systems are interspersed with checkpoints, monitored on a regular basis by selected individuals across our internal and external operations. Human right audits are conducted at operation and third-party sites to monitor the level of policy adoption and verify their compliances to our code and policies. In them we map out:

  • Locations that have not implemented policies

  • Locations that have partially implemented the policies

  • The parameters that are difficult to implement at specific location, and reasons thereof

Respect for human rights is an integral part of our global sustainability strategy and we commit to transparently report on the progress of our efforts in our internal periodic reports, Sustainability Reports and Business Responsibility Reports.

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Assessment Results |Human Rights Policy

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“UPL and its subsidiaries have made every attempt to ensure accuracy of the information provided on this website. However, this is a global webpage with access to different geographies for wider reach and greater awareness of UPL. In the course of doing the same, UPL has used Google translator plugin to convert the language of this website from English to select regional languages.

UPL therefore, does not accept any responsibility or liability on the nature, standard or the accuracy of the translation and cannot take responsibility for any type of inaccurate contextual meaning in the event of a mismatch from English to a regional language.”