It was 1974. Bangladesh - the country known to be flood-pronewas reeling under acute famine. People were dying all around. That struggle of his fellow beings to survive the famine gave a terrible jolt to the conscience of a university teacher - Muhammad Yunus. Being an economist himself, he could not stand the visible failure of all the economic theories that he had studied from Dhaka University in Bangladesh to Vanderbilt University in the US. This drove him out of the university corridors to find for himself what exactly was happening.
He first spoke to a woman making a bamboo stool. This conversation made him discover that she borrows capital from a local trader to buy raw material and deliver the bamboo stools by evening to him and in the process earns two pennies a day. It sliced through his heart. He enquired: "What she would do if she had the money to buy the bamboo?" Pat came the reply: "I would double or triple my income." This made his path clear.
He however resisted for a while the temptation of being carried away by what the woman said, and instead, sent his students to the village to enquire if the woman was alone in her plight. After a week's study the village - Jobra revealed that there were 42 people of similar fate and all that they needed was a capital of $27 to start their business. The young economist, moved by these findings, could not but put his $27 in their hands advising them to "liberate themselves" and repay the capital whenever they could.
Well-intended experiments seldom go wrong: women started repaying the capital, though in crumbs. This elated Muhammad's spirits. Being encouraged and getting convinced about the potency of the "easy-loan" to metamorphose the lives of the erstwhile human beings existence into meaningful living, he coaxed the local banks to extend similar loans to the people of nearby villages, standing himself as their guarantor. Enthralled by the honesty of these poverty-inflicted villagers in repaying the loans, he enlarged his canvas by 50 more villages. And that is how the concept of "microfinance" sprouted and the seed for Grameen Bank was sown. |
