India lacks a messiah for microcredit

At a recent International Press Institute (IPI) World Congress in Myanmar, it was fascinating to reconnect after several years with the founder of Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus. Both the sessions he addressed were fascinating, but the one that compelled attention was the one on women and the media.

Every time you listen to a Grameen Bank story, particularly its initial phases, told by Yunus, it’s a gripping narrative because he ties up its humble beginning with what it is today. The Bangladesh government might have made him leave the bank with all kinds of trumped up charges, but even today, he takes ownership for the unique institution he created and talks about it with a passion and perspective that is mindblowing.

Consider this. When in the mid-1970s Yunus, then a professor of economics at Chittagong University, sent out his women students to nearby villages — “as a man I couldn’t talk to the women, only my women students could” — to persuade them to take tiny loans, the women ran away.

The most common responses were: “I don’t need the money. I don’t know what to do with money.” Or “I am afraid of money”; “I can’t handle money, why don’t you give it to my husband; he knows about money.”

From such a situation, this bank owned by the poor women of Bangladesh, has traversed such a long distance that last year it disbursed $1.5 billion in loans. And for the first time ever, the total deposit of the borrowers alone exceeded $1.5 billion! “So I tell my friends in the Grameen Bank: ‘Look, it is about time you stop calling them borrowers because the actual borrower is you; you’ve taken more money from them than you have given them.’ So the tables have turned.”

As he went on to relate the kind of safeguards he has developed for these women — a pension fund so attractive that many women have opened more than one pension account with the result that while Grameen has 8.5 million borrowers, there are more than 8.5 million pension accounts — you wonder about the kind of quagmire microcredit in India has sunk into at least in some States, such as Andhra Pradesh.

We, with our far bigger and superior institutions and systems, not to mention the humungous funds available for disbursement and the tens of millions of women who could have really benefited from microcredit, never had a messiah like Yunus.

As though politicians getting into the act just for women’s votes had not muddied the waters enough, there were private players who sought to make huge personal fortunes through this route. A far cry from the Grameen Bank headquarters in Dhaka I visited in 1998 and later in 2006 after Yunus bagged the Nobel. The first time the Grameen building did not have an elevator, and Yunus took the stairs like everybody else to reach his room on the third floor. He took black tea like everybody else (“It is the milk and sugar that pushes up the cost”, he had smiled while offering me a cup). His room was not airconditioned: “We’ve designed it in such a way that there is a lot of natural light and air flowing through all the rooms”, he had smiled.

Today, of course, things might have changed. The Grameen Bhaban in Dhaka, where Yunus still has his office as chairman of the Yunus Centre, an initiative in social business, is a multi-storeyed building and access would most likely be through elevators.

But it is the simplicity and humility of the man that bowls you over. After he got the Nobel in 2006, when I called to congratulate him, the first words he uttered were: “You asked me last time (1998) when I would get the Nobel; we’ve got it now.” It made me feel as though I too was part of that success.

At every stage in the growth of Grameen and its foray into other sectors — Grameen Shakti, which provided loans for lowcost renewable energy options, Grameen Udyog, Grameen Phone — Yunus had to fight battles with bankers, bureaucrats and others.

When initially the women ran away from taking loans he was pressured to lend to men who were queuing up. So he patiently explained to his students that when a woman says I don’t need, or can’t handle money, always remember that “this is not her voice. It is the voice of history. Ever since she was born she was told she is not good for anything, grew up to be regarded as someone who doesn’t exist. When she was born she was unwanted, told she had brought misfortune on the family being a girl child. She is apologetic about her existence; we have to put confidence in her. She is covered with layers and layers of fears. Our job is to peel off this fear layer by layer”.

Can anyone put this better or in stronger words about the reality for Indian women — in the 1970s, as now?

And then Grameen did something else in Bangladesh, the likes of which India never saw. Put the mobile phone into the hands of poor women way back in 1997. In the 1990s, when the Bangladesh government was giving out licences for mobile operators, Yunus applied. Everybody made fun of him for wanting to put the mobile phone, then a luxury for the rich, into the hands of poor women who had never seen a phone!

But he had a business plan for them; give them Grameen bank loans so they could buy a mobile phone and sell airtime in their villages where nobody had a phone, and make money.

Yunus got the licence and Grameen Phone rolled out in 1997, and “has become such a roaring business. Nobody had any idea that people had such a hunger for calling each other”, he told the IPI conference. In a few years, Grameen Phone had 4,00,000 telephone ladies all over Bangladesh doing great business. “It was an instant ticket out of poverty!”

In the process, Grameen Phone became the largest of the six telephone companies in Bangladesh with half the market share, and is the largest taxpayer. The country of 160 million people has 120 million subscribers and the market is still growing.

What is more important, these phones came with the telephone numbers of the Prime Minister’s house, office, the minister for women’s affairs, the local MP, the police chief, and several others.

Small wonder Yunus was ousted. Which government would like giving a voice to the voiceless?

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