Yunus wants to give poor a sip from ocean of money

Kolkata, Feb 14 (UNI) Nobel laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus wants his system of micro-credit to help the poorest of poor in the Indian subcontinent to have access to money, which presently they cannot have through the conventional system of banking.

But he hopes the conventional banks will someday open up to the poorest of the poor in the world and the rural population in the subcontinent will not continue to be exploited.

''We live in an ocean of money but poor people do not have a sip of that. We, in Grameen Bank, tried to offer that sip to the poor,'' said the Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize laureate, at a meet organized by the South Asia Research Society here.

Grameen Bank (GB) has reversed conventional banking practice by removing the need for collateral and created a system based on mutual trust, accountability, participation and creativity. As of December, 2006, it has 6.91 million borrowers, 97 per cent of whom are women. With 2319 branches, GB provides services in 74,462 villages, covering more than 89 per cent of the total villages in Bangladesh.

''We have reached where conventional banks will not. The banking system of the country (Bangladesh) does not even recognise these people. I think credit should be accepted as a human right,'' said the Banker to the Poor who set up the Grameen Bank way back in 1976 when he was Head of the Rural Economics Programme at the University of Chittagong.

Noting that it was not a ''conscious effort,'' he said and added, ''Every step led to the next and to the next. It was like a challenge thrown at me and I accepted it and moved on.'' He had launched an action research project to examine the possibility of designing a credit delivery system to provide banking services targeted at the rural poor with the objective of extending banking facilities to poor men and women, eliminate the exploitation by money lenders and create opportunities for self-employment for the vast multitude of unemployed in rural Bangladesh.

''We have given chance even to a murder convict after he was released from jail. I was not interested in his past. He later went on to become a successful centre manager of Grameen Bank,'' he said.

''Conventional bank will simply not lend the money to the poor.

But when we stepped in, we became concerned about the person's future. I was simply not interested in his past or when a person borrowed money and did not pay back or made a mistake. We demanded no collateral, no surety no, legal paper-work, nothing. My simple rationale was that the person would pay back because he or she would want to keep the door of credit open for future loans and opportunities,'' said Prof Yunus.

''They kept paying back because for the first time they got an opportunity which no one earlier gave them,'' Mr Yunus said.

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