Bandhan Quotes

“The data, compiled by Sa-Dhan, showed that 67 per cent of the 37 million MFI customers live in urban India. The share of rural customers was 69 per cent in fiscal year 2012. That dropped marginally to 67 per cent in 2013. In the following two years, the share of rural customers has declined drastically. In 2014, rural customers constituted 56 per cent of the total. It dropped further to 33 per cent in the following year.34”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank

“About 9.2 million loans by an estimated 6.5 million borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, whose population was just about 48 million (or about 9.6 million households) in 2010, defaulted on their loans from MFIs, the largest number of defaulters in any single location in the world.”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank

“REMEMBER! said the three-column ad in Indian newspapers, TODAY is A DINNERLESS DAY. Thus the government one day last week began its campaign to prepare Indians for what has become an annual food crisis. It was bad enough last year when India harvested 88 million tons of grain, far short of the nation’s need. This year the harvest is expected to fall below 75 million tons. What with some 12 million more mouths to feed, India faces its severest food crisis in two decades.”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank

“In terms of prioritizing disbursing new loans to borrowers versus repaying banks, my logic was that in microfinance, the confidence of the borrowers is everything. If we slow down—or worse yet, stop—disbursements, and borrowers think the institution will fold, they will stop paying en masse. It is effectively the reverse of a run-on-the-bank. In AP, for example, the MFI Act prohibited us from giving borrowers new loans, and sure enough, borrowers lost confidence in SKS, and our repayments in AP dropped from 98 per cent to 10 per cent in three months. It was game over. We had to write off Rs 1300 crores.”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank

“Basix also did not get a licence for a small finance bank which RBI gave to ten entities in 2015, eight of which are MFIs. VM said it was the final atonement for his being with the Kauravas. Possibly, he was referring to the MFI’s love for private equity investors who do not love the business of serving the poor as much as they love the money that is generated”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank

“The manual says each employee would get a bag from Bandhan once in two years, but this bag cannot be used for personal use.”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank

“Ghosh would leave home early morning and hang around Shobhabazar sabzi market watching people. One day, he saw a burly man in a red T-shirt riding a Royal Enfield Bullet. When the gentleman stopped at the entrance of the market, half a dozen women rushed to him. In fact, they had been waiting for him to arrive. To each of them, the man gave Rs 500 and collected Rs 5, simultaneously. He came back late afternoon, this time wearing a blue T-shirt. The same women—who were vegetable sellers in the market—returned the money, Rs 500 each. Ghosh watched the ritual with curiosity for a few days. Every morning, the women would buy sackfuls of cauliflowers, tomatoes, brinjals and spinach outside the Sealdah railway station, from the farmers who would come mostly from Lakshmikantapur, South 24 Parganas, and Barasat, North 24 Parganas. One evening, when those women were about to leave the market after settling the moneylender’s dues, he could not resist asking them why they were paying so much interest to this man. His calculation was fairly simple: on Rs 500, they were paying Rs 5 as interest for half a day. This translated into 1 per cent interest for half a day, and 730 per cent a year! But the women told Ghosh a different story. They were not paying any interest; rather, they were just buying a cup of tea for the moneylender. Moreover, they were earning enough to afford this. ‘Will a bank give us money?’ the group of women asked him in a chorus. How else would they get money without documentation and a guarantor? Besides, they were saving time and travel cost as the money was being given to them at their doorsteps (in this case, the market).”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank

“Another time, a zonal manager told me how a borrower tried to push in actual pins at an ATM that had asked for a PIN to enable cash withdrawal.”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank

“the reader gets a peek into India’s banking and finance history, starting with the founding of the country’s largest bank, State Bank of India, then called Bank of Calcutta, on 2 June 1806, with the original purpose of financing General Wellesley’s war to subdue Tipu Sultan and the Marathas in central and western India.”
― Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank