The new WEP committee with ICCC President
From left to right: Smita Dayal, Ravi Malhi, Mini Khurana,
Naval Bajaj, Shibani Sahney, Ginni Sethi.

For more photographs, click here: WEP launch

Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce (ICCC) celebrated the International Women’s Day on March 08, 2013, by forming the Chamber’s first Women Entrepreneurs and Professionals (WEP) committee.

The committee comprises Ginni Sethi, Ravi Malhi, Mini Khurana, Smita Dayal and Shibani Sahney. Initially, the committee will focus on providing a platform for women entrepreneurs and professionals and work to augment ICCC’s membership in that demographic.

The committee was launched prior to the panel comprising eminent Canadian women of Indian origin to share the stories of their journey to success.

Immigration & Women – the tough road to success was the theme of the panel discussion and the panelists included Hon. Amrit Mangat, Parliamentary Assistant to Ministry of Children and Youth Services & MPP; Hon. Dipika Damerla, Parliamentary Assistant to Ministry of Community & Social Services & MPP; Kanta Arora, eminent television personality and President Arco International Languages; Rajni Tekriwal, Founder, Tekriwal Law Office; and Syerah Virani, Founder & CEO at Zentrepreneur Inc. Kanta Arora moderated the discussion.

The event witnessed unprecedented participation from community women, who comprised 90 percent of the 170 people who attended the program. Surbhi Guleria-Joshi, the former director of ICCC was honoured on the occasion by the Chamber’s president Naval Bajaj with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal.

Explaining the genesis of the formation of the new committee, Naval Bajaj, ICCC’s President, said, the Chamber has had a long history of adapting to the new developments within the community. “ICCC has done different things and done same things differently,” he observed.

The ICCC President noted that during the last 15 years or so, ICCC has initiated several measures to reflect the changing needs of its members and its stakeholders.

It began to advocate for the small businesses nearly a decade ago to enable them to become globally competitive; in recent years it has launched new programs to address the needs of newcomers to Canada by India through its mentoring program; then last year it launched the Canada-India Mining Committee to tap the growing opportunities in the natural resources sector.

Hence, seen in isolation, the formation of WEP may seem like a major step; however, when seen from the perspective of evolution, it reveals ICCC’s adaptability and dynamism.

Naval Bajaj said that the ICCC has consistently given due weightage to women’s role and achievement in public sphere. When it instituted the annual awards more than two decades ago, it recognized the achievements and the contributions of women entrepreneurs and women professionals.

“But it isn’t just in these categories that we have acknowledged women. In fact, women have been recipients of awards in several other categories as well,” he noted.

During the panel discussion, each panelist gave a brief but engaging glimpse into her journey in Canada after immigration. The uniting element in the theme was the challenges they all had to face and overcome, not just professionally but even at a personal level. All of them had a simple and straightforward message for newcomer women – don’t give up.