Vijay Mahajan, is the co-founder and founder of some of India’s most well known livelihoods and social enterprise groups: the NGO PRADAN, and the BASIX Social enterprise group that has transformed the livelihoods of over three million lower income households across twenty states in India, as well as in other countries across the world.
Born in 1954, Mahajan graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1970. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1981 and in 1988 he spent time at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University as a mid-career fellow.
He began his professional career at Phillips, a job that led him to travel extensively across rural India. After his MBA at IIM Ahmedabad, he joined the fabled NGO ASSEFA, and worked with the Bhoodan Movement in Bihar, the voluntary land reform movement where land was given to the landless poor. After working with the landless poor to develop the land they had received, through extensive land, agriculture and water development, Mahajan co-founded PRADAN, or Professional Assistance for Development Action in 1983 and in later years, the first entities that would grow to become the BASIX group in 1996.
At BASIX, Mahajan led his team in offering agricultural and technical development assistance, livelihood financial services that included microfinance, and institutional development support.
Today, Vijay Mahajan is the CEO of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies. He is in conversation with his former colleague and mentee, Preeti Sahai,an adaptive leadership educator and coach.
This conversation was recorded at Vijay Mahajan’s office in Delhi.
Audio used:
- Unleashing change agents by PRADAN CHANNEL
- The Pioneering develolpment apporach of Basix by basix b
TRANSCRIPT
HOST
Welcome to Grassroots Nation, a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, a show in which we dive deep into the life, work, and guiding philosophies of some of our country’s greatest leaders of social change.
Today’s episode is a conversation with Vijay Mahajan, the co-founder and founder of some of India’s most well known livelihoods and social enterprise groups: the NGO PRADAN, and the
BASIX Social enterprise group that has transformed the livelihoods of over three million lower income households across twenty states in India, as well as in other countries across the world.
Born in 1954, Mahajan graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1970. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1981 and in 1988 he spent time at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University as a mid career fellow.
He began his professional career at Phillips, a job that led him to travel extensively across rural India. Following his MBA at IIM Ahmedabad, he joined the fabled NGO ASSEFA, and worked with the Bhoodan Movement in Bihar, the voluntary land reform movement where land was given to the landless poor. Mahajan worked with the landless poor to develop the land they had received, through extensive land, agriculture and water development. This work led to him co founding PRADAN, or professional assistance for development action in 1983 and in later years, the first entities that would grow to become the BASIX group in 1996.
At BASIX, Mahajan led his team in offering agricultural and technical development assistance, livelihood financial services that included microfinance, and institutional development support.
Mahajan has been feted as a social entrepreneur and leader for his important contribution to the sector. A man with no end to his work in sight, he is committed to the cause of making India a better country for its people. In conversation, his indefatigable spirit and commitment is palpable.
Today, Vijay Mahajan is the chief executive officer of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies. He is in conversation with his former colleague and mentee, Preeti Sahai,an adaptive leadership educator and coach. Preeti works on the politics of identity and leadership in social and political spaces. She teaches economics and quantitative methods to mid-career students at the Harvard Kennedy School in the summer and runs her own farm in a village in central India. For over two decades, Preeti and Vijay have been colleagues and friends.
This conversation was recorded at Vijay Mahajan’s office in Delhi.
PREETI
Hi VM, how are you doing? It’s so wonderful to have you here today.
VIJAY
I’m doing fine, Preeti, just got back from a whole week in UP.
PREETI
Exciting stuff?
VIJAY
Yes, exciting stuff! Trying to figure out how to promote ten crore jobs while they make UP into a trillion dollar economy.
PREETI
Oh! Do you ever do anything without thinking of the number in advance of how many people you are working with, or you’re hoping to work with?
VIJAY
As you know from our working together, behind every email there is a hidden excel spreadsheet. No, I just like to think in quantitative terms, although I am not, I don’t limit myself to it. It just makes it sharper.
PREETI
I remember you saying once, “you know I am damaged forever, I studied to be an engineer.”
VIJAY
Yeah. I mean the IIT has had a huge impact on the way I think. I’m an electrical engineer at that. So it’s basically math and physics with some workshop work. So that’s how I work. I mean, I have to have rigorous theory for whatever I do, even though I mean it may not come in advance, it’s kind of iterative. You try to work reflectively, build your theory as you go along. But you’ve got to have a theory.
PREETI
Tell us where this began, I mean, tell us what you were as a young boy.
VIJAY
I was just sort of… Nothing unusual. I’m the fourth of four sons and a late child at that. So my next elder brother is 14 years older than me. So by the time I went to school, two of my brothers had finished or were in NDA, this was Pune. So at one level I’ve had a single child bringing with two doting parents and three doting brothers. But on the other hand, they were pretty lonely because they were all three of them when the defense services actually so they will come home only for annual leave for about three weeks.
I made it to an IIT, so then it sort of opens up the whole world to you of… And the years when I went to IIT, 1970 onwards, five years it used to be, they were really well-rounded places.
PREETI
I have often, through some of your late evening conversations and stories, heard you reminiscing about the IIT days and indeed about the social science that it taught you. Did the IIT also, I would say for now surprisingly, have a role in you stepping into the social sector?
VIJAY
True, absolutely. Because, you know, I grew up in cities, urban middle class, had never been to a village except for boys scout camp in school. It’s only in IIT, that through NSS we went to some villages. But very early, I think I was in my first maybe second year, by that time Bunker Roy had started working in Tilonia. He’d started the Social Work and Research Center, Tilonia, which is known as the Barefoot College. And Hindustan Times, at that time, the editor used to be BG Verghese and he published an article on Bunker’s work and I found it very fascinating. Then Hindustan Times also adopted a village called Chhatera somewhere just near Delhi and there used to be a column, weekly column, called Our Village Chhatera, where BG Verghese and his colleagues used to describe… I was very fascinated by that. So we used our NSS, National Social Service scheme field visits to understand. By the time I think I was in third year, I had started feeling that something is seriously wrong with rural India.
Of course by that time, you know, the early 70s were a period of great ferment. I mean what happened in the late 60s in Europe, student movement, started happening in the 70s. And 73 was the Gujarat Navnirman movement and then 74 onwards the JP movement. Infact I remember I had finished IIT, literally rolling up my bedroll in the hostel when somebody came and said, “Oy emergency ho gayi,” so I said “woh kya hota hai?” So you know, it’s kind of… But as one figured what that was, it some extent changed one’s life choices. I decided I won’t sit for the civil services, for example, and just took whatever regular job that came my way which was actually a job with Philips and that too turned out to be a marketing job. So that’s what I did for four years – put on a tie and sold everything from radios to scanning electron microscopes.
PREETI
What were the leadership traits you acquired there? Did you even exercise leadership there?
VIJAY
Not in Philips so much. I was just a Young Management Trainee and then Regional Product Head. But in IIT I was quite involved with the number of extracurricular activities. So one got elected to various positions and… And JNU was, by the way, round the corner the old campus, and we were deeply aware of what was going on in JNU, you know, the left politics versus… The free thinker were more at that time than the ABVP. So I I learnt what could be called organizational leadership, but not political or public leadership. But I learned a fair amount about organizational leadership while at IIT and that came in very handy subsequently. Philips I learnt systems, you know, I mean that company had ICL computer which used to print invoices in 1976. Invoices are printed by computer, you know, I mean it was a seriously systematic company.
PREETI
So what after Philips?
VIJAY
That rural India, poverty, development bug that had bitten me in IIT, got actually, quite counterintuitively… Because in Philips I was a boxwaala. Used to wear a tie and had a small apartment in New Alipore etc., But my work used to take me to a lot of the hinterland in eastern India– Bihar, Orissa, the North East and Calcutta itself was a great contrast. You could come out of the Grand Hotel and find the people lying on the pavements of Dharmatala. So this issue of how do we deal with this kept bothering me. And because I had come to know NGOs before that, so one part of me kept saying arrey those guys are the real ones that were trying to solve or address these problems. So I used to take time off and go and visit… I maintain contact with Kishore Bharati which was where the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme started, so I used to participate in those, particularly the summer training camps for the teachers. There were a lot of other young people from other IITs, Delhi University etc. who used to come. So you might say, a group of people all concerned about the same set of issues but not necessarily agreed on what to do about it. And that was great because it gave you a pluralistic approach to things. And so, after working in Philips for four years, I felt very restless. So I wanted to go and actually start working in rural India. But there was also this middle class you know, thing about arrey kya ho jayega? So I thought, okay, let me do a…
PREETI
Career insurance.
VIJAY
… yeah, career insurance. You heard me say that earlier, right? So I decided to apply to IIM Ahmedabad, got in, and said, “Okay now with this I think I’ll get a job anywhere sometime or the other.” And when I went to IIM Ahmedabad, I already knew about Professor Ravi Mathai who is the Founder Director and who by that time had retired and… I mean he had not retired but he had stepped down as director and he used to run this rural project in Jawaja block, Ajmer district. So literally in the very first week there, I went up to Ravi and he introduced me to Professor Ranjit Gupta and the two of them kind of adopted me as their chela. And I did lots of things with them, did my summer job there, did every project that I could convert into a project related to rural. Plus I did a strong dose of Economics when I was at IIM-A. Professor Rangarajan was there, Professor Dholakia was there, Professor Vyas was there, so absolutely… top minds. So by the time I finished IIM-A-
PREETI
With a gold medal and a wife.
VIJAY
-and a wife, that’s right. I met Savita, she was a classmate and because she had studied economics in Delhi school for a year. So she in some ways taught me more economics than I learnt from the books. But there was still this confusion that to address this problem of inequity, poverty as a result, what should one do?
So simultaneously on the one hand, I applied to Harvard Kennedy School and got admitted, though didn’t get a full scholarship. Which is just as well because thank God I didn’t go. And had also joined a Prof at IIM-A, Professor N.C.B. Nath who ran an organization called FAIR which did some rural, in retrospect, one would call it rural policy advisory work, in those days we called it consultancy. And immediately plunged into field work and immediately went back to Bihar. By the time Savita and I had got married, Savita had started working with Maruti in Delhi. And one day I just came and told her that, “Listen, I am going to this move to Bihar to work with this Gandhian NGO called ASSEFA which works to help settle people who received Bhoodan land pattas but are still effectively landless.
PREETI
Didn’t you think you were overqualified for that?
VIJAY
No, actually I thought I was seriously under qualified because I had visited with Loganathan ji, the Founder and I was quite mortified actually. The thought of, “What the hell will I do to contribute to this?” But I had this you might say, deep sense of, “Listen, this problem cannot be solved in theory, and it can’t be solved by not… your not being a part of the solution.”
Savita was of course already prepared. I mean we got engaged actually at the end of the first year in IIM. And we had our conversation and she knew that I’m quite into these issues, what form they would take one didn’t know. The compromise we had made was that she will of course continue to do what she wants to do, which is fine by me, and I’ll do what I want to do. And I will come from Bihar once a month for a few days, which suited everybody.
PREETI
But that didn’t happen, I’m sure.
VIJAY
Well I used to come once in six weeks for about a week because coming once a month was too frequent.
PREETI
Those were both interesting and very difficult days, I remember some of the lift irrigation work and other stuff that you did over there. How were those years formative in you becoming a social entrepreneur?
VIJAY
You know, so my self concept was that people like Bunker or Joe Madiath or Anil Sadgopal or Loganathan ji, Shankar Guha Niyogi that these are the people who are actually addressing the problem that matter. The best a chap like me can do is assist. So I never thought of myself as a social entrepreneur. But I had this thing that, “Yeah, yeah, you guys are great, but I can help you to be more effective.” So whatever it is, and indeed when Loganathan ji asked me to join ASSEFA and I did, he said, “You can choose your own designation.” So I said, “Okay, great Loganathan ji. I want to be Manager, Technical and Management Services.” So he had a laugh, “What the hell is that?” I said no, “I want to be clear as to what I’m doing.” And that’s really what we used to do. We used to work on the technical side of things and the management side of things.
PREETI
What did that mean in working with farmers?
VIJAY
So for example, when I took over the ASSEFA Bihar project, the budget had all been spent. These few 100 borewells had been installed, but no water had reached the Bhoodan lands. Why? Because, nobody had done integrated irrigation planning and the groundwater specialists AFPRO were called and they said, “You can drill borewells here,” and that was done and most of the money got spent on that. But the fact that the lands are by very nature of groundwater, usually groundwater is found in the lower side of the land and if the land which you want to irrigate is 10 or 20 feet higher than there, you would need pumps and you need pipelines. Nobody thought of that. Now for an electrical engineer who’d never seen a diesel pump in his life… Of course it took only a few days to figure it out, it’s that level of technical problem, not that we are doing some rocket science. And numerous others like that. And many in the agricultural field and so forth, so not all related to… And management of course, you know, you are always under budgeting, there is not adequate planning, there is not adequate monitoring. I mean the standard stuff which you know for corporates who spend all their energy selling toothpaste, to do more planning and more monitoring than some of the best development projects, and I used to find it so problematic. So that’s why PRADAN’s long name is Professional Assistance for Development Action.
PREETI
Tell us about PRADAN, how did it begin? We also want to know who you were leaning on. I mean, you were at the center of setting this up, but who were your go-to people? Who were in some way anchoring the Vijay of that time, both emotionally and conceptually, and you know, in taking this significant risk of sorts?
VIJAY
So, you know, Ravi was still alive when PRADAN was set up. So Ravi was of course, greatly… He was like not so much responding to the detail of the idea – that Ranjit used to do, Ranjit Gupta. But Ravi was kind of, “Yeah, the idea is right,” you know, at that level. And Professor Pradeep Khandwala as well, in fact, Pradeep who later on became Director, I’d sent him the PRADAN concept note just for an opinion, and before I knew it he published it in Vikalpa, the journal. So I it was quite… But on a more practical level, Deep Joshi who was at that time Program Officer at the Ford Foundation… Deep is like my soulmate, we together really came up with the concept of PRADAN. Deep independently felt that unless people with good education and good intent work on the ground, things may not improve. And I had in a different way arrived at the same. So when we met in the context of my working with ASSEFA, we realized that this could be the seed of an idea. And we talked to Loganathan who is the founder of ASSEFA and said that, “Certainly would like to try it out with you, and then if it works, will you help us set up an organization which does this for other NGOs?”
PREETI
So you piloted in some way the concept of PRADAN in some ASSEFA projects?
VIJAY
Yes, yes. So I was an ASSEFA employee only for a year. From the second year onwards, PRADAN had been set up and I was its employee number one deputed to ASSEFA. And indeed the first five PRADAN professionals Vasi, Achintya, Ved, they were all deployed in ASSEFA. But we had such a fantastic relationship with ASSEFA that we learned a lot, we contributed enormously and ASSEFA went into a seriously high orbit because of our work. So it was a mutual acknowledgement. And actually, to be honest, since then we’ve never had that level of success in working with an NGO. But soon thereafter, Al Fernandez of Myrada also adopted us. In fact, when we set up PRADAN Board, Al was the Chairman of the board, Loganathan ji was the Vice Chairman, a professor from IIT Rajendra Prasad, another senior IITian Ravi Zutshi, Professor Vatsala Nagarajan from IIM Bangalore, Col. Verma from AFPRO.
PREETI
Can you give us a glimpse of what it is that you tested out and learnt at ASSEFA during the PRADAN pilot and then brought to the rest of PRADAN? Because PRADAN now is like amongst the most well respected in the space.
VIJAY
I mean what are technical and management issues in development, you know, it’s all about the political economy. And at one level that’s true, but those political economy questions can be only addressed in the political paradigm. I somehow never had that self concept. I did want society to improve, I did want the poor to have a better life, but I never had a deep revolutionary view of the world. So what we were trying to test was, is it possible to do development work more effectively if people like us work at the cutting edge where it matters. And so PRADAN was a dedication to just that simple hypothesis that people with, you know, good technical management education – and technical includes agriculture and all – working with poor communities directly on the ground, can they make a difference?
AUDIO ABOUT PRADAN
And that hypothesis turned out to be resoundingly true and it therefore attracted a lot of young people and they feel very satisfied. In the current account, you know, you can see the results of your work within a few months, so it’s very gratifying, it’s very addictive.
PREETI
Give us a slice of what that looks like? What is it that gets seen in 6 months?
VIJAY
I was in Bihar in Gaya district, so I walk into this village which has got about 50-70 acres of wasteland, jisko Bihar mein tand ki zameen bolte hai. Never cultivated and not even leveled.
PREETI
Considered uncultivable.
VIJAY
Yeah, and that is why it was given away as Bhoodan land by landlords to the landless people. The landless people never had any resources to cultivate it, right? In the meantime this NGO had come which said, “Ohh what they need is water, so let us dig bore wells.” And they did that incompetently, all my respect for ASSEFA and AFPRO. And by the time I took over, there was this wasteland, there were these borewells, serious disappointment in the village. Infact, the first time I went for the meeting in the village, they really piled on to me saying, “We have seen guys like you before,” and all that. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong, to figure out what to do. And in three months time we had installed the irrigation pipelines to take the water from the borewells to the upland, we started land leveling, we dug sumps to lower the diesel pumps to a certain height because water level was way below. The suction height cannot be more than 27 feet, so if the water is at 35 feet, you’ve got to lower the diesel pump down to atleast eight feet. And to figure this out it took me a week, but once we figured it out, machine – “Sab jagah sump khodo!” “Haan Vijay bhai, aap batao, hum karte hai.”
PREETI
Did the community respond well to you?
VIJAY
Initially with a lot of skepticism, but immediately after the first thing worked, they completely flipped you to, “You just tell us and we will do it.” We had to solve a number of other issues of how to manage these installations by the community. But what we learnt was that you have to go into the micro detail of how these things work or don’t work and then sit with the community to come up with solutions that will work in their context. I don’t believe in this romantic notion that the people know everything, nor do I believe in this hubris that we professionals know everything. I think the best situation is where we sit together and, you know, work out the solution together and you pick up a lot of things.
To give you one example, in the same village, in the morning, there was no such thing as ODF so in the morning we all used to just go to one corner… And there was a small riverlet. I used to always wonder that this riverlet has water atleast till February, why wasn’t this used to do atleast protective irrigation? By that time I got to know the AFPRO head in Patna quite well. I won’t name him, but in my next visit to Patna I asked him, “Aapne ye nadi ka paani kyun nahi istemal karne ke liye bola?” He says, “What are you talking? We are geo-hydrologists, we don’t look at surface water.” I searched for solutions and I found that there was as a tradition of building what are called kanris. Kanris are very small kachcha intake wells by the side of the small riverlets, using latha kudi. Latha is that long –
PREETI
Bamboo.
VIJAY
Yeah, bigger than bamboo, timber and kudi is the leather or –
PREETI
Something that can hold water.
VIJAY
Why couldn’t we do this? So after that, though we had run out of budget, I managed to get some supplementary budget, but then I dumped the whole idea of borewells and I said, “No, we will build these kanris and use a portable engine because we can’t afford to have 50 diesel pumps. Now there are portable engines. And then we again went into the market and found there something called a Villiers engine, which is petrol start and kerosene run, and it was only about 22 or 24 kgs so it could be easily lifted on farmers’ shoulders and they could move it from place to place. And flexible hose pipe. We were in business. I irrigated 10 times more area with 1/10 of the budget. By then it was already my second or third year. So what I’m saying is that it’s in these micro details, that’s what development is.
PREETI
How did you teach this kind of thinking and embedding oneself in the community to your colleagues at PRADAN?
VIJAY
So in that I think Deep and I were a great combo. Deep is a very deep thinker and he is very oriented towards teaching. And I basically love to do things and learn, and whoever is participating with me learns a lot, but I can’t for the life of me, stand up and give a lecture.
To sort of fast forward on the PRADAN story, I also by that time realized that whatever we do is such a trivial part of development compared to what the government does. And if I am into this bug about improving effectiveness, then the entity whose effectiveness I should improve is not some poor NGOs who are already doing their best in some ways, but the Sarkaar. Easier said than done because you know… The one thing that I have learned, Preeti, is that if you have a good idea and you persist with it, sooner or later society throws up opportunities for you to….
PREETI
Give us an example?
VIJAY
So Mr. Indrajit Khanna, who taught at IIM Ahmedabad for one or two years but he is Rajasthan Cadet IAS officer, he used to be Education Secretary in Rajasthan. That’s how I came to know Ravi, he came to teach at IIM-A. Several years later, he became Joint Secretary IRDP in the Ministry of Rural Development in Delhi and I had stayed in touch with him. So one day he called me and said, “Vijay, you know, thanks to Mr Rajiv Gandhi as our Prime Minister, all of us have been issued computers. You know anything about how to use these things?
PREETI
What year was this?
VIJAY
This was ‘86. By 1991, I had left PRADAN to try and see what could be done. Again, I had left with a lot of confusion by the way, it wasn’t like I left to start BASIX. I left because I was dissatisfied with doing all this work using grants. And so basically somewhere in 1993, I said, “Okay, I’m going to set up a financial institution for the poor.” I mean, in those days I used say “bank for the poor,” because I didn’t know that you can’t set up a bank so easily. Fortunately, Professor Rangarajan, my IIM Prof, had become Governor by that time. So I wrote him a letter and he very kindly invited me over. I said, “Sir this is what I want to do.” And he looked at me very kindly and said, “Vijay, even if I wanted you to give you a banking license, I can’t, and I will not.” I said, “Why not, Sir?” “Well, first of all, you have no banking experience so you don’t have the qualification. Then anyway it requires 100 crore of equity, where will you raise it from?” So I said, “So what should I do, Sir?” So he looked at me kindly and said, “You should set up a non-bank finance company, and then, you know, if that does well, maybe a time will come and then it can become a bank.” So I thanked him and came out feeling rather dispirited. Came out of the RBI central building and across the road, in the old RBI building there used to be a book shop. So I crossed the road, went out to the bookshop and said, “Bhaisahab koi NBFC ke upar kitaab hai?” So they give me three fat books, and that’s how the feasibility…
PREETI
Despite your disappointment you went ahead with the NBFC idea immediately?
VIJAY
Well, atleast I did a lot of work. I mean, after that I spent a lot of time with SEWA Bank thanks to Ela-ben’s kindness and understood how that works and then got a grant from the Ford Foundation to study the Grameen Bank and BRAC in Bangladesh, BRI Indonesia, Accion Bank in the US. So in about two years I had got a very good understanding of the banking sector and in that I had two very important colleagues, one was Nagarajan who was a chartered accountant – very enthusiastic about development work, and the other was Bharti Gupta Ramola who was my batchmate from IIM, that time she was with Pricewaterhouse(Coopers) and she was also interested in development. So we together did some serious policy work to the point where in 1995 we were again ready to make a presentation to the RBI and indeed to Dr. Manmohan Singh and we got appointments at both places. And in the case of RBI, Dr. Rangarajan, of course had already said, “Yeah, you guys are ready to go to the next orbit.” Mr RV Gupta who was the Deputy Governor IAS, very hard-nosed, wonderful gentleman, he said, “Mr Mahajan, with due respect, I don’t believe all these things that you are saying about microfinance either in Bangladesh or Indonesia. There is something wrong with these numbers. How can it be 98% repayment rate and all this?” I being the cheeky fellow, I said, “Well, if don’t believe me why don’t you go and see it yourself?”
And sure enough, three months later, Mr. RV Gupta led a delegation with Mr. Kotaiah then-NABARD MD, and Yashwant Thorat who was at that time I think manager, and I think 2-3 others, they went to both Bangladesh and Indonesia. By the time they came back, unfortunately Dr. Manmohan Singh’s government, I mean Narasimha Rao’s government had fallen. Dr. Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister and Dr. Rangarajan had retired. So I thought, “This is it. Nothing gonna happen to that idea.” We were so close to setting up a bank for the poor. And then Rangarajan sahab became Governor of Andhra Pradesh and I by that time moved to Hyderabad to set up BASIX. So I was kind of, once in a while I used to meet him. One day, I got a call from the governor’s office saying, “The governor wants to speak to you.” So I said, “Yes.” He says, “Vijay, this Chidambaram has called. He’s presenting the budget in a few days and he wants to know about that bank for the poor thing that you were talking about.”
PREETI
What was Mr Chidambaram then?
VIJAY
He was the finance minister. I still remember the date, 26th August 1996, it was a mid-year budget. The ‘Local Area Bank’ was announced, a new category of bank with only 5 crore equity to work in a concentrated area of three districts, primarily for the underbanked people. And the term LAB, of course, comes from one guy who loves acronyms.
PREETI
And he also set up the first KBS.
VIJAY
As it happened, it took three more years, and in the meantime we were just going to a village and trying to figure out how to get a loan from the friendly bank manager…
PREETI
Of the friendly Mahajan.
VIJAY
Yeah. To actually get the RBI to set up a whole new category of banks – the Local Area Banks today later became the small finance bank. So that’s… in some ways, as you can see, it’s been a systematic application of what one learnt academically, what one learned experientially, and what one needed to learn as the problems one wanted to address unfolded themselves.
PREETI
BASIX was not just about BASIX. What you were doing in those years and many years to come, from a distance atleast, looked like a different experiment compared to PRADAN. It looked like you were building the whole sector because nearly every registered microfinance institution was first meeting you, referring to you, learning from BASIX. I mean the ones that I know personally, I know that you mentored personally, many of the founders of these financial institutions that worked for the poor. So what was that effort like to build really the whole system? The sector?
VIJAY
Yeah, so I think that was because, the nature of… I mean the size of the problem was so enormous, at least by my understanding it was roughly 100 million households. Of course, official numbers were lower 60-70 million. But 100 million households, according to me, needed microfinance. Even with all my professional hubris, I never imagined that one would be able to set up something like that. So I said okay, in fact, the BASIX feasibility report said we will get to 1 million poor households in 7-10 years, guaranteed. But that’s still 1% of what India needs. So it’s obvious that we need to set up the whole sector. So BASIX is only just primus inter pares, first among equals. We are showing that what we are doing can be done. And what are we trying to do? Professor Yunus had already started showing in 1976 that the poor are credit worthy. Ela-ben from 1973, that the poor are credit worthy. So in 1996 to show that was not a big deal. What the big deal was, was to show that institutions which primarily lent to the poor are investment worthy, which means the capital markets had to embrace us.
Now that is a conceptually more complex challenge. In practice, of course, seriously complex challenge, but that’s what I had set out to do. So the moment you say, “Hey, the task is not to get some money from… wholesale money and give to the poor,” that task is good enough, but not enough. Task is to persuade the capital markets and this is a new asset class in which they can invest. So BASIX, set up in 1996, was the first commercial microfinance institution. You know, I left the nonprofit world to set up a for-profit company. The first for-profit commercial microfinance institution, the first one to get an international loan. It was called external commercial borrowing in those days, in 1997. The first one to get a loan from an Indian bank, Global Trust gave us the first loan in 1998, the first one to raise equity from IFC and others, ICICI, HDFC, before they became bank in 2000. The first one to get a credit rating, the first one to do a portfolio securitization etc. So and the reason why we had to do it first, I was fed up with being first, because we were building a road to go forward.
Some were great mentors like Elaben, Dr. Rangarajan himself, you know he’s a professor and very professional, so he doesn’t give you much leeway just because you are a shishya. Elaben helped me set up Sa-Dhan, way back in 1998, we set up the Association of Community Development Finance in India. Elaben was Chair, I was the co-Chair. She insisted that I be co-Chair, I wanted to be vice-Chair. She said, “No, you be co-Chair.” Then some wonderful people in the financial sector. Mr. Kotaiah, who later on became NABARD chairman, Mr Brijmohan Sidbi, later on Mr. Nanda. Then many people at a lateral level, who were collaborators – Nachiket Mor at ICICI then many who later on started other microfinance institutions, Vikram Akula, then Samit Ghosh from Ujjivan and so forth. To me it was no big deal that we would be the exclusive, the big shot, but that at least if we get to 20-30 million poor households, that would be a big deal. So every task force that the RBI set up on financial services, since 1995, I have been a member of. I have lost count of how many, you know… I mean, for example, the Rangarajan Commission Committee on Financial Inclusion 2007, the Raghuram Rajan Financial Sector Reforms 2009, all these… I did that. I spend something like a quarter of my time doing this policy work and did that because we have to build the sector, build the whole ecosystem.
And then many from the research community, people like MS Sriram, academic, IIM, people from the business press – Tamal Bandyopadhyay. So there is a whole ecosystem that arises. People from the technology world… I had brought Nandan to see our Local Area Bank in 2008, and the term ‘financial inclusion’ was just beginning to be talked about. And from there, 2007 National Committee and Financial Inclusion, 2008 National Plan for Financial Inclusion, which said every adult should have a bank account…
PREETI
I’m going to ask you to step back a little to your transition from, I mean, I know it was over a period of time and over a series of experiments, the transition from a grant-led not-for-profit organization like PRADAN with the highest levels of professionals working on the field, to looking at the capital markets to reach the poor. It almost feels like an ideological change. What was that like?
VIJAY
Yeah, you are so right. See, when I left PRADAN, I mean it was not overnight, that five year transition period. I left PRADAN in ’91 and BASIX began in ‘96, although I had kind of decided it by ‘95. But that four year period, first, for me personally, that transition from how can you take a loan from a bank and give it to poor people and expect it to be repaid, and what if they don’t repay, how will you, you know… But the counter to that was, and here of course my training, pretty good finance training at IIM Ahmedabad helps, that, “Boss, you need not 1 crore, not 10 crores, you need a few 1000 crores. And in today’s time we need… last year total microfinance was 3.5 lakh crores, 3.5 trillion crores. The year I am talking about its not even 100 crores, right? So if you have to go to that order of magnitude, it has to be structured in a manner which is acceptable to the financial sector and follows the laws of finance, which means there’s got to be an underlying risk capital which then gets a higher reward than debt capital, you know? But you know, the moral stamp really mattered. So there was a sub-fight which was within the credit sector and I had participated in that also – the Self Help Group movement. Where you said okay banks are not able to lend to the poor directly, we create these community structures, women Self Help Groups, banks should lend to SHGs and SHGs lend to individual women, and that’s the right model, as against the MFI model where a commercial entity borrows from a bank and then lends to an individual or small groups. And I experimented with both and supported both. BASIX worked with thousands of Self Help Groups. But I felt that that was not enough because the amount of money that women were getting through self groups was ₹2000-3000 whereas they needed ₹15-25,000, you know? So that fight actually became quite interesting, you know, and there is much more bitterness among people who supported the Self Help Group movement completely versus those who went for the microfinance. I was kind of in the middle, but…
PREETI
You did both.
VIJAY
I did both and I believe in both, but I think that they are complementary and not mutually… I mean, that one can replace the other.
PREETI
Even within BASIX, VM, there were times when you made conceptual strides in how BASIX should function which were disappointing to a lot of your people, or at least it was a path which was just too new. I remember the… I am forgetting that exact name…
VIJAY
The livelihood triad?
PREETI
The livelihood triad, was that a study?
VIJAY
No. So the story is like this. BASIX started in 1996. At the end of five years, by which time, by the way, we were the poster boys of the world –
PREETI
Boys and girls, come on. There were enough girls in BASIX.
VIJAY
Okay. And the organization was, you know, I mean, this is embarrassing because my own view was not that we were doing such great work, but people used to just go gaga over what we were doing. So I said let’s do an impact assessment at the end of five years and we hired a bunch of scholars and got IMRB to do the field survey and when the results came out, it showed that as compared to a control group, only 52% of our borrowers, who had paid all loan successfully, they paid all loan successfully, only 52% had a significant increase in income as compared to the control group. Of the remaining 48%, 23% had no change and 25% actually suffered a decline. And when we heard that, we of course, “Ehh wrong study, wrong study, data theek nahi,” denial.
But I must say to these people who did the study, they said “You go and see it yourself.” So sample size was about 800 I think. So we said, “Okay we’ll take 200 out of that. The 25% who said… And 10 of us from BASIX will go and visit 20 households each and see whether this is true and why so.” And when we did that, and I did not just 20 but probably 60 or 70, we realized that interestingly, what we had written in our own feasibility study, that credit is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for livelihood promotion, had proved to be true. So these 25% had got the loan, exactly the same terms, everything, but they had many other problems. They suffered from a high degree of risk, the animal died, there was no insurance. Or whatever they were doing was not enough in terms of productivity, you know, to produce much of a marketable surplus. Whether it was a crop or a…. At the end of the low productivity and high risk, they still had something to sell in the market. When they turned up at the traders shop, they got the worst terms because the trader knew that they were desperate to sell. What is this nonsense? And that also after knowing that we need to do this. So I went into a deep contemplative phase as to how to do this. And out of that came the strategy called the Livelihood Triad.
The triad is three sides of… One side is financial services, the other is agricultural and business development services, and the third is institution development services, the institutions of the poor to unite them and so that they can deal with markets on their own terms. Business development services for improving their productivity. And financial services, we added insurance in a big way. By 2005, we were the world’s largest micro insurance retailer… the world’s.
PREETI
World’s? How many were we doing?
VIJAY
We were doing 1.2 million or some number of lakh.
AUDIO ABOUT BASIX
PREETI
You were invited to be a member of the IRDAI at some point?
VIJAY
That was later in 2005, but in 2004 when the IRDAI wrote the first micro insurance policy in the world, in any country, basically, Satya and I were the drafts people.
PREETI
Satya, for reference, is the current group CEO of BASIX.
VIJAY
And he is BASIX’s Mr. Insurance. We did the world’s first weather-based crop insurance pilot with-
PREETI
Weather Risk.
VIJAY
Yeah, I mean, at that time Sonu used to work for ICICI Lombard, and so… So we went after risk, we went after productivity, and we went after bargaining power through these three solutions.
PREETI
So when you moved from the credit only or credit primarily space to doing all these three services, I remember I was in BASIX at that time. It was a very hard time. People were like, “I know how to do this, but I don’t know how to do that. And now this guy is telling us to do everything.” So the man who was loved and adored by everyone down to the last person was suddenly somebody who was idiosyncratic now! How did you both personally and institutional deal with this? Because I’m guessing this was not a critique that ordinary people like us on the field were making, but your own colleagues sitting with you thinking through these policies would have also been making. And it’s also because we didn’t know more, I mean, I didn’t know how to sell both a loan and insurance or at least a loan and a non-farm-sector service. What does it like for you?
VIJAY
It was terrible. I mean, first I fought with the board including the investor members because they said, “Hey we put money into because you are a damn good microfinance institution so stick to the knitting.” And I said, “To hell with your knitting. It doesn’t fulfill the purpose of which I have set up this institute, you know?” And well, you know, they didn’t want to fight.
So everybody thought I was crazy, and I fought and that’s when I had a heart attack exactly in 2004, when I was just about to turn 50, because I’d worked myself up into such a tizzy that, you know, it was difficult for everybody and for me. Fortunately for me, I had wonderful colleagues. Sadly before I had my heart attack, I had also fought with Prasad who was the CEO by that time of the finance company, and said, “If you don’t agree with me then find yourself a regular NBFC. We are going to do livelihood promotion.” And Prasad was an absolutely terrific professional, you know, I mean, he realized I’d gone crazy, so he left.
PREETI
But had you gone crazy? Because in some ways the connection between leadership and purpose is so strong that you were holding on to purpose. And I remember from the orientation times, you would say that if you don’t feel connected to livelihood promotion, then this is not the place for you to be.
VIJAY
True. But you know, I mean, now that I am older and wiser I think I would have taken Deep’s advice, which is that, “One should be fundamentalist about purpose, but for nothing other than that.” So strategy can be, you know, should be a matter of expediency. So, one could have actually done it that way but I said, “No, it’s got to be integrated into the same balance sheet, we’ve got to raise money for it together.” And so thereafter, for every successive year, BASIX lost in their league tables. By 2005-6 we had started losing colleagues, by 2007-8, we stopped getting additional capital. In 2008, CRISIL called me, he said, “We are going to downgrade you.” We would have triggered a whole lot of other events, you know, because the lenders would have had to call up their loans and… So I begged them for literally three days because they can’t downgrade… And begged SIDBI to give us some equity. And they did. That was the first 45 crores we got after a long time. By that time I realized that it is not possible to convince the mainstream world of finance about what I am trying to do, so I’ll have to be more circumspect about it. In the meantime, I had these wonderful colleagues, Ramana, who took over from me after I had my heart attack. He continued to run, and he’d come from ITC so he knew Integrated Livelihood Promotion. Having learnt from the India Leaf Tobacco Division, they really knew how to work with farmers.
So Ramana did a great job. And then the board insisted that we get a CEO who is seriously financial sector oriented. So that happened in 2009. And the financially happy days for BASIX came. It became increasingly… I mean, at the peak, 2010 October, BASIX was an 1800 crore company with a half a billion dollar valuation. And a week after that, the Andhra Microfinance Ordinance was passed, making it not illegal to do microfinance, but to go and ask a borrower for repayment either at the home or at the workplace became illegal.
PREETI
What did you do to you personally? This was just, I mean, a big chunk of your life’s work.
VIJAY
Interestingly, I was, at that time, I had anticipated this crisis because this fight between SGH and MFI… Andhra was the… So I had a year before that to set up MFIN, the Micro-Finance Institution Network and was the President. So I was too busy trying to save the sector and BASIX was like, “Yeah, yeah, woh bhi bach jayega agar sector bach gaya toh.” So I was all the time doing sector work, MFIN work, and it was helpful that I was not the CEO, it was Sanjeev and then when he left Manmad took over. One great thing about BASIX was that we always had such a good second and third line that there was never a shortage of…
PREETI
It’s interesting you say that. It’s not just BASIX. One of the things we talk about in leadership is that it generates more leadership, it generates capacity, not dependency. And I have seen you, an individual and the few institutions that you set up, as shining examples of that. There are BASIX colleagues and friends who are now handling bigger portfolios than BASIX ever handled.
VIJAY
50 times bigger. Srinivas Bonam, who is head of Rural and Microfinance for IndusInd, his portfolios 50,000 crores.
PREETI
And he was with BASIX.
VIJAY
You select good people, but then, you know my tough love business… People have got to work in the field and learn from that. And I have no problem with people making mistakes, we will take that cushion, but people have to be proactive and learn and contribute while doing. So you know you hire bright people…
PREETI
But your definition of “bright” was also very interesting. You never went for necessarily only, unlike PRADAN, the good degrees, the fancy institutes…
VIJAY
Yeah, so I had learnt in PRADAN that just because you are from an IIT or an IIM doesn’t make you God’s answer to this country’s problems. There were lots and lots of wonderful development professionals who had no fancy degrees. I learned that. So by the time I came to BASIX there was almost, virtually other than Shankar and Partha, I don’t think there was anybody else from IIM background even. In fact, both Satya and Srinivas Bonam, were walking the streets looking for jobs. And we had this office on the ground floor behind a petrol pump and our startup company was called Indian Grameen Services. They both saw that board and came up and said, “What is this?” I remember when Satya walked in actually, we were having a meeting so he said, “I am looking for a job.” So I said, “All of us are, just sit down.”
PREETI
But what was it, what was special about what you did with all these people? I mean, they have just stayed with you as friends, you have continued to mentor them and they run like huge organizations, many of them larger than BASIX.
VIJAY
First, I think very quickly one becomes a co-learner, rather than a leader. And secondly, I mean as Savita keeps complaining that I have absolutely no life other than work. I say I have no work other than life. I mean, I have so much fun doing what I do that. So that co-learning along with it being such a great fun experience, I think just becomes very heady. And also I think we choose our challenges among the more difficult ones. So that helps, you know, because it also then is something… At the end of it you achieve something special, usually valued by society. So it’s all very heady.
PREETI
But yeah, that’s the thing. You were surrounded with brilliant people because you allowed them to thrive, you allowed them to grow. Who gave you that space to grow? Where did you learn this from? I mean to me that is leadership in the deepest sense. You allowed so many 100 people to…
VIJAY
So you know, I learned it from Ravi Mathai, seeing it in practice, but completely… I’ve never met Vikram Sarabhai, but I am his absolute complete total admirer. Vikram Sarabhai set up, when I last counted, 16 outstanding institutions. And in every one of them, there’ve been outstanding leaders. I used to know Kamla ji who worked very closely with Vikram. So through stories, anecdotes one has heard many many things. And just to give you one example, Satish Dhawan who was Vikram’s successor at the ISRO thing… When SLV III first launch, failed, he’s the one, as Chairman of ISRO told the Mission Director, “You stay behind, I’ll deal with the press.”
PREETI
Yeah, who would take the hit for it?
VIJAY
Exactly a year later, when SLV III launch 2 succeded, Satish Dhawan was still the chairman, he told the Mission Director…
PREETI
“Now you go.”
VIJAY
Yeah.
PREETI
There’s this incredible balance of holding people through difficult change processes and pushing them. I have seen you do that just beautifully. Of course, sometimes the change is so hard for some people that they break and they move on or whatever. That’s really something I’ve seen in you with not just people who worked with you, but with the several institutions you have helped build. Tell us something about Vijay Mahajan, the institution builder. You may not like that phrase, I know, because all you talk about is people, organizations, real problems, etc,. But what is it that has helped build so many… And I am also talking about the institutions, you remember Gram in Andhra where we used to go? Nizamabad.
VIJAY
Yeah. That was, of course, an ongoing place. But you know, something like APMAS, which is Andhra Pradesh Mahila Abhivruddhi Society and that was set up in 2000, you know, and it represented my, sort of, attempt at… simultaneously as the microfinance sector is growing to also help build the SHGs more systematically. Because by that time, thanks to Mr. Kotaiah at NABARD and Chandrababu Naidu as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, the SHG model had taken off. So APMAS was… I did the feasibility study for it. And the question was should there be a dedicated financial institution for the SHG sector or should it be primarily into capacity building? And I truly approached the question agnostic about the answer, did very thorough analysis on both sides…
PREETI
You were agnostic about the answer?
VIJAY
Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know.
PREETI
And the reason I am asking you is people think leaders are visionaries, that they have this vision which everybody needs to follow in with and…
VIJAY
No, the year that I spent doing that study, you can ask Nagashree, the young woman who worked with me, and Rama. If it was Monday, it was going to be a Andhra Pradesh Mahila Bank, and if it was Tuesday, no, no, it would be a capacity building organization… They went crazy.
PREETI
What gave you the internal, the stomach for that kind of uncertainty, because the states were always high beyond a point, right?
VIJAY
I think just the need for something which is theoretically rigorous and elegant. That’s where the engineering based on physics and math comes, you know?
PREETI
So it didn’t fully damage you?
VIJAY
So, but APMAS was set up, happy to report that it is now in its 23rd… they are about to celebrate their 25th year, I think. Sa-Dhan is celebrating their 25th year now, PRADAN 40 years.
PREETI
And what a stellar 40 years.
VIJAY
PRADAN just got a 350 crore corpus grant from Azim Premji Foundation.
PREETI
It’s unheard of, right? Those numbers.
VIJAY
PRADANhas its 8th Executive Director. Every five years, it changes like clockwork. Many, many such things, but the fact that there is a problem that has to be addressed is the key and the best, theoretically most rigorous and most elegant way of addressing it, search for that… Which is why its also fun, you know, because you’re also trying to solve it as a problem, you know, not like kuch bhi kar dete hai.
PREETI
Another thing that I have learned in leadership theory, which I have seen your practice forever, so it was easy for me to agree with that theoretical perspective was that for real problems you can’t practice leadership alone. You need to know how to ask for help, you need to work with others and I have not seen you do anything alone. Indeed, I remember one of your jokes, which was from your side, probably not even fully a joke, that, “I am really a coward. I don’t do anything alone.” And we would make fun at the other end saying, “Here he comes with his baraat, now, it’s his new baraat.”
VIJAY
Yeah, but it’s true. I am mortified at the thought of trying these things alone. I’ve got to have, but I’ve got to have multiple types of partners. So some who are only, aaj kal ki bhasha mein “vaicharik,” you know? Conceptual partners. And some who are basically, jumping into action. I mean, just this last week I’ve had conversations, deep conversations, some with people who were only into Lohia Jai Prakash, they were the two… Others were saying, “Aap humein bataiye na karna kya hai.” And I need to work with both, so thats the key. But it’s time for us to wind up and I want to end by talking about one or two things that…
See, the political economy approach came rather late to me in life. I mean, in theory I was aware of it even when I was in IIT, thanks to JNU being across the dhaba. I myself did not have any large systemic view of things in PRADAN. I’m not sure, I mean, you know, trying to improve IRDP is not systemic enough, from a JNU point of view.
PREETI
Yes, it doesn’t change the caste system, let’s say, right? But I think you have to allow yourself the credit that you were always thinking in terms of systems, and still have the ability to talk to the farmer with a beedi in your hand.
VIJAY
I love the fact that you find all this adorable, but…
PREETI
It’s not because I find it adorable, it’s because I think it has something to do with leadership and having the ability to learn.
VIJAY
Yeah, but let me tell you where the disappointment comes from. You know the number “350 million poor”has remained in my consciousness ever since I started dealing with these numbers. It’s gone plus, minus, idhar, udhar thoda bohot, post COVID we were back to 350 million. So shit man, there’s got to be some structural explanation for this. For all your so-called good work, are you really sure you’re doing something that makes a difference? So in that sense. So while I am very happy, I can sort of talk for another 24 hours about all the lovely stuff one has done but at the other, it’s not enough.
PREETI
So VM, a couple of questions here. You have been so popular almost… I mean you probably don’t know this but there is a fan club out there and when two members meet, they bond over the fact that they have worked with you and known you and… But that’s not it. It’s not just being popular with human beings, it’s also having done important work, sat in important committees, places. Did this get to your head ever? Did success get your head? And if not, why not?
VIJAY
I have to admit that there were many times and I felt very gratified. My definition of gratifying is when I would feel like boasting to Savita or to Chirag, my son, or Chandi, my daughter, because quite honestly, at home you are just ghar ki murghi. So to say, “Hey, this happened, that happened.” But I don’t think this really went to my head. Since we are in G20, sort of, just got over, 2008 financial crisis, immediately after 2009, G7 had an emergency meeting and it was in Pittsburgh. And G7 doesn’t have a Secretariat, whichever country hosts it, that country becomes the Secretariat. So the US Treasury was the Secretariat for the Pittsburgh Summit and they must have looked up, because they have to do something about how the crisis is affecting the poor. So the U.S. Treasury is scratching their heads because, “Oh, there is something called the poor? Okay.” So they probably looked at the Yellow Pages and found something called, “Oh, there is something called Consultative Group to Assist the Poor at the World Bank? Okay, let’s call them.” CGAP. So Elizabeth Littlefield used to be the CEO and I was a Board member and we were both used to work very close with each other. So one day I got a call from Elizabeth quite late at night, past midnight. She said, “Can you take a flight and come to US?” I said, “I will consider, but what for?” She says, “Well the treasury wants us to do something, financial services for the poor. This is the chance we were looking for.”
Anyways I couldn’t go but I worked with Elizabeth over the phone and email for the next several days and then the event happened and even Elizabeth was not invited, obviously. But since then, G7 set up a permanent working group on financial inclusion, actually inclusive financial services.
I don’t know whether it’s because of the stuff we did or whether it was because the leaders had decided they want to look good or whatever. So that’s the kind of cheap thrills I live on. Yeah! I got financial inclusion into the G7 agenda! So stuff like that, but I don’t think beyond that momentary level of feeling gratified of boasting…
PREETI
What do your regrets look like?
VIJAY
Not being adequately mindful of the political economy behind these big problems and therefore not doing enough about it. For all my insistence on theoretical rigor and elegance, the framework that I was using was not adequate.
So the regret is that in a sense, one ended up in an undefined orbit. I think as a result its done a lot of good to a lot of people, and perhaps in concrete terms more than if one was in one of those more influential positions. But all said and done… By the way, Ajay Banga, who was World Bank Chair, was my batchmate at IIM-Ahmedabad. So, you know…
PREETI
So what would you say, what would you give as, Iif there were leaders, leadership material, listening to this conversation, what would you say to them about your hopes and fears, your anxieties, your optimism for the future? What should they look out for?
VIJAY
I am intrinsically very optimistic about humanity. You know, I think we have this ability to somehow, using a collective intelligence, save ourselves from the brink. Many of the brinks are self created by humanity, but we tend to save ourselves and go to the next level. I think the problem almost always is the elites. My theory of history is very simple – whenever any society has its elites, when they are in large proportions have become self-serving, society declines. And when they are public spirited, society improves. And it need not be… The elites still remain elites, they still have a good life. But it’s just about whether you spend most of your energy feeding your own coffers or… So I think that the period between say roughly 1965 to now, has been one of increasingly self-serving elites. But I think the next generation is showing great signs of being public spirited and innovative, iconoclastic in a very matter of fact way. Not being unnecessarily rabble-rousing revolutionaries. And to me, the use of technology in such a pervasive way, though it has its problems, but I think in the long run it is going to be significantly liberating. I mean, just see for all the negative stuff that we talk about on social media this and that, but the Internet is such a huge force for equality. I mean, in terms of information access, you know, 10 billion electronic transactions last month in India. Do you remember when we were in the village together where that woman in Rajasthan… were you there? When we did the first testing of mobile phone deposit?
PREETI
I must have been because I was running the TAFE. TAFE is Technology Assisted Financial…
VIJAY
I don’t know whether you were there at that time when we were trying it in Rajasthan, this village, and the woman, there were about 40 women who had agreed that they would deposit money in SBI and only one of them eventually did. She deposited ₹10, and we thought of the great celebration, we took a photo, everything. After 10 minutes she came back and she said, “I want my money back,” and we had to do the reverse transaction. And sure enough, it worked, thank God. And then all 40 of them came and somebody gave ₹20, somebody gave ₹50.
PREETI
The importance of building trust.
OUTRO
Thank you for listening to Grassroots Nation. For more information, please reach out to us a www dot rohini nilekani philanthropies dot org or join the conversation on social media. Stay tuned for our next episode of Grassroots Nation.
