Give Back, Get Back

All these years I procastinated my involvement in nation-building. I was happy paying taxes, and later abusing government about what I get back in return to the hefty tax payments.

The timing of my exit from my previous firm was such, that I thought it was better for me to devote myself into assignments with a larger cause. Today I am sitting with some excel based financial modeling work. The same is an accounting spreadsheet for an NGO, which has limited resources to invest in technology instead of investing in humans. It is been 3 months I have been visiting Ludhiana every now and then. I distinctly remember my first visit to the city, when I was taken to a shed type home where 4-5 families stayed in similar number of rooms. Not only did they stay there, they did their chores in that shed and also earned a living out of small enterprises they ran in these sheds. There was a bunch of 15 urban poor women, looking at me as if I had a magic wand to produce currency notes. I could hear a distinct noise of a sewing machine, as I inquired about the same I found a woman was doing some stitching work. The whole day labour brings here little less than Rs. 100 ($2 a day). I was like wow!!

In my bag I had this book "Banker to the poor" by Dr. Muhammad Yunus and I could see in front of me what I had read. The abject poverty is many a times caused by our social and economic systems. So i had this task of extending credit to such women who were enterprising yet were perceived a risky bet by the banks. 3 months have passed, today our firm (I advise) stands at 2.5X the loan book which I took over in November.

It is interesting to see what the $150-$250 loans can do for people at Bottom-of-Pyramid. More than anything else these loans provide means for economic sustenance and financial independence where it is mostly needed. Remember the country's law makers have already missed the bus, we have a bulging young population. Only now has the government become a bit serious about ramping up capacities in education, industry and employments. So we are highly likely to be 10-15 years behind where we should have been. So whatever skill sets our BoP junta has needs to be capitalised by providing them employment, training and credit to run their own enterprises.

Without capacity creation amongst say the bottom 25% population, the rest 75% population may not be able to enjoy the GDP growth we are witnessing.

I was in Jharkhand recently, and I saw there are kids in village schools. I was very happy to see that. But for us the city dwellers this comes as a surprise, half the class is on chairs/benches. The other half is sitting on the ground. There is one teacher who takes science/english/hindi lectures in turn. There are just 3-4 classrooms where they claim to have eight standard school!!!. One this that greatly impressed me was mid-day meal scheme exists. There were queue of kids at every school I visited. Holding plates and spoons, kids long for the nourishment Indian government provides. At least it relieves me about malnourishment of large chunk of people.

There is just so much to learn from these experiences, I leave for another round of trips to Punjab and Jharkhands. Give Back, may sound exotic phrase but remember what you get back out of it is even more wonderful.