India presents a steady growth opportunity for us. The aggressive growth of the Indian market is turning the country into an attractive option from an expansion perspective. We have done some reorganisation last year to make our business more compatible to the Indian markets. With effect from September 1, 2005, we have taken the initiative to restructure the organisation. We have now organised ourselves around five business lines. This change enabled us to bring in the critical element of FOCUS in our business.

Our current businesses, under each crop group, are fast expanding and we are set to bring in new technologies, in near future, around these crops at an increasing pace. The emerging business scenario called for increased focus and specialisation in order to execute the strategies. We have created Crop Groups (CG) to bring in the desired strategic long term focus and rigour in the business. Each CG will develop the long term strategies of the crops and ensure delivery of the current business targets by way of profitability and market share.

Our objective is to create a winning environment. The Human Resources (HR) function aims to provide an environment where our employees are consistently successful. We work to align our People Strategy with our core organisation values "The Pledge" and our stated business objectives. Key to our strategy is the need to ensure diversity of people and thought, foster innovation, practice inclusive teamwork and promptly recognise and reward performance.

We are committed to maintaining the highest level of integrity in all our business dealings. Integrity includes honesty, decency, consistency and courage. The values of the Monsanto Pledge radiate inward as well as outward. While the Pledge elements clearly serve to guide Monsanto in its public behaviour, they also provide the framework for interactions between the company and its employees, and among individual employees.

Monsanto India Limited can be described as an organisation, which excites people at work. We continue to remain in the Business World's Top 50 “Great Places to Work” in India. Our open work culture motivates our employees to foster new ideas. The other aspect is our quality of work, which is both challenging and world class. Since we rank among the best in the agricultural sector, we employ some of the best work practices. We give our employees good growth opportunities, thereby raising their satisfaction levels.

HR puts substantial effort in retaining the unique Monsanto culture. This culture is characterised by high performance and informal interactions where excellent results are rewarded and recognised. We are an open organisation with free flowing transparent communication, where people operate without hierarchies or boundaries. People in Monsanto are highly empowered. There is a strong emphasis on learning and contributing as well as enjoying your work. Emphasis is placed on enhancing diversity in our workforce, which provides different view points and strengthens our decision making processes. The strength of our culture is reflected in our low attrition rate and high employee satisfaction levels.

New employee orientation is a very important aspect of HR. We have an established process and are fine tuning it regularly. In fact, the latest global people strategy also involves strengthening the on-boarding system, which has been adapted to suit the Indian requirement. We also take great care that our values, such as the Monsanto Pledge and the Business Conduct Principles, are imbibed by the new employees when they start work.

We make every effort to create a performance based ambience. The keystone of our high performance workplace is the Development, Performance and Reward (DPR) program. It is a performance management system, which we use to drive performance. The system ensures clarity of goals and objectives that are intrinsically linked to our highly variable incentive system. The close linkage ensures that we are able to provide strong compensation incentives for above benchmark performance.A distinguishing factor of the DPR system is the high weightage given for self development and people management. This ensures that managers closely align their functioning with the growth and development of their people and themselves. In effect we incentivise people to develop themselves.

The People Review Process (PRP) is another effective tool to engage talent in Monsanto. It is used to identify high potential individuals’ talent and put them on a faster growth path. It also creates a succession plan, which ensures business continuity.

The year has seen the launch of a Global People Strategy at Monsanto. These strategy initiatives look to revamp HR processes and systems in the organisation and make them more responsive to upcoming business challenges. The plan is comprehensive, impacting all aspects of HR including competencies, compensation and incentives. Significantly, the enhanced people strategy looks to align all processes on a robust information technology backbone. The organisation has articulated a new competency set, which we believe is significant in the identification, development and evaluation of future leaders.

As always, we have kept our focus on people development. This year, the Monsanto Advanced Sales training program was conducted by internal trainers for the entire sales organisation and was received very positively. We also ran the ‘CLIMB’ program for advanced relationship management. We have some exciting new programs which will be launched in 2007 - People Leader Learning Series I&II. We have ensured constant training on business conduct and safety to make sure that our employees reflect strong value systems. Continuing with our pursuit of leadership development, three managers were sent to different parts of the Monsanto world, including the United States, for expatriate assignments.

Safety

We are great believers of the saying, “Safety First.” Safety is of prime value to the organisation. More than half of the organisation operate from the field and are moving around in vehicles travelling on an average of 200-250 kilometers per day through difficult road conditions. Therefore, we make sure that we have a much focused policy towards safety training for our employees. Defensive driving is a key component of this training. We have employees who work voluntarily as driver safet y coordinators. They are entrusted with making sure that the people they cover are well equipped with the tools of defensive driving. They also make sure that they are informed about near misses and accidents so they can analyse and find solutions to it. This year the vehicle safety performance was excellent, close to four million kilometers driven by our employees without any serious accident or fatality.

Apart from that we also maintain a healthy environment in our offices and plants and we try to maintain our number one position here. We had been aware of the Avian Flu virus and related issues before the actual scare. A multidisciplinary team, focused on addressing potential implications of this virus for our business and employees was already at work since 2005. This prepared us to quickly address the issue when it actually happened. During the Avian Flu scare in 2006, we brought out circulars and arranged vaccines for the employees and their families.

All our sites have been injury free for the past five years. We have sustained our Safety and Enviromental Management Certifications at Eluru, Bellary, and Silvassa Plants. Our sites at Hyderabad and Mumbai office have sustained their safety certifications.

Our Bellary Site won the Global Safety Award from Monsanto Corporate for 2005, the only manufacturing site to do so in Asia Pacific. It was also awarded 5th Place in the South Indian CII Safety Implementation program. In March, it was recognised by the Karnataka government for its safety performance and was awarded a Rolling Shield in Self Audits (GRISD).

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