Society

My views about the society

There are 59 posts filed in Society (this is page 4 of 12).

Five Values exemplified in the book “Banker to the Poor” by Muhhamad Yunus

Among some of the best books that I have read is ‘Banker to the Poor‘ (buy from Flipkart or Amazon) by Muhammad Yunus. It is the story of how he created Grameen Bank with the vision of easy credit availability to those who need it the most. It is a fascinating read, and it is impossible not to take something away from it. He saw a vision, and against all odds, ran Grameen as a business and gave micro-credit to the world. He changed the way the world looked at banking. Apart from the economics, he and Grameen Bank has had a huge social impact in Bangladesh, with millions of households being empowered to live a life they love. For his efforts, Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

There are many traditional human values which have been exemplified in this book, and by Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus. These are the values which are common to most successful people, most winners alike, be it in the field of sports, business, politics, or social change. I am listing below the five basic values which the story of Grameen and Mr Yunus very clearly demonstrate –

1. Vision

Muhammad Yunus describes the poverty situation in Bangladesh in this book as “There are many ways for people to die, but somehow dying of starvation is the most unacceptable of all. It happens in slow motion. Second by second, the distance between life and death becomes smaller and smaller, until the two are in such close proximity that one can hardly tell the difference.” He started the Grameen Bank and his microlending experiments with a vision to eradicate this poverty, from his country and from this world. He saw credit as a very basic human right, and went to provide it to the poorest of the poor. He saw the vision of a poverty free world where credit was easily available to those who are most in need of it. He had this vision in Bangladesh, an Islamic country where business and money is looked down upon. Most of his borrowers are women, even when the purdah is still prevalent in rural Bangladesh. He started a bank when nobody in Bangladesh supported him. But he had a vision, and no obstacle can deter him from his vision.

Yunus with his borrowers

Yunus with his borrowers

2. Patience

There is a famous quote by Gordon Livingston, “Only bad things happen quickly. Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life’s primary virtues. ” You will not find a better example which demonstrates patience than the story of Grameen Bank. Muhammad Yunus started his experiments in 1974, starting with a $27 loan to 42 people. He continued his experiment from village to village asking the government banks for help only to find closed doors. The Grameen Bank was established only in 1983 and he had to face several hurdles from the government and big banks every step of the way. It was only due to his patience and determination that he turned his dream into a reality.

3. Perseverance

The initial days of his micro-lending experiments were rocky. Nobody believed that he can do what he was saying, and his numbers always fell on deaf ears. He never got funds from the government banks, and Grameen was formally formed only in 1983 after years of perseverance. He continuously had to execute his pilot projects on a bigger and bigger scale just to prove his concept, which he did without frustration and anger. He turned conventional banking practices upside down by lending to the poorest, people who have no collateral and to women who form now 98% of the bank’s lending population. Inspite of all this, he persevered and continued his efforts. He changed his strategies, tactics, and goals over and over, but he never changed or give up on his vision.

The story of Yunus and Grameen Bank

The story of Yunus and Grameen Bank

4. Adherence to Principles

Right from the start, Yunus created a culture of hard work, integrity and simplicity for all his employees. He mentions in the book how his branch managers go out into villages and talk to people about their problems and not just about their business. Simplicity is evident in Grameen branches all over Bangladesh. The pay is minimal to the employees and they have to undergo a training living with the poorest. He created the Sixteen Decisions, which asked borrowers to modify their traditional ways of living. The 16 decisions are –

  1. We shall follow and advance the 4 principles of the Grameen Bank – discipline, unity, courage, and hard work – in all walks of our lives.
  2. Prosperity we shall bring to our families
  3. We shall not live in a dilapidated house. We shall repair our houses and work toward constructing new houses at the earliest opportunity.
  4. We shall grow vegetables all year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus.
  5. During the plantation season, we shall plant as many seedlings as possible
  6. We shall plan to keep our families small. We shall minimize expenditures. We shall look after our health.
  7. We shall educate our children and ensure that they can earn to pay for their education.
  8. We shall always keep our children and the environment clean
  9. We shall build and use pit latrines
  10. We shall drink water from tube wells. If they are not available, we shall boil water or use alum to purify it.
  11. We shall not take any dowry at our sons’ weddings; neither shall we give any dowry at our daughter’s wedding. We shall keep the center free from the curse of the dowry. We shall not practice child marriage.
  12. We shall not commit any injustice, and we will oppose anyone who tries to do so.
  13. We shall collectively undertake larger investments for higher incomes
  14. We shall always be ready to help each other. If anyone is in difficulty, we shall all help him or her.
  15. If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any center, we shall all go there and help restore discipline
  16. We shall introduce physical exercises in all our centers. We shall take part in all social activities collectively.

These principles, along with the credit from Grameen, empowered the villagers day after day to live up the vision of Muhammad Yunus of a poverty free future.

5. Innovation

All through his fight for micro-credit to the poorest and his journey with Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus challenged traditional practices and continuously innovated to find a way through the different challenges he faced. One of his innovation was to focus on lending to women, as they are more likely to think about the benefit to the whole family. All this in a Bangladesh where women were not even allowed to touch money. Whatever traditional banks did, he did the opposite. He loaned to the poorest of the poor, he loaned to people in groups, not individually. He gave loans without any collateral or security, and without paperwork. He simplified loan repayments by weekly meetings of self-help groups. By all these innovations, Grameen and Mr Yunus effected a paradigm shift in the financial banking system.

P.S. – See all my favorite books here

Volunteering, What It Can Do For You?

Volunteering has a meaningful impact on your community. It contributes to the overall social and economic health of the community, as people are engaged positively into contributing for disadvantaged sections of society. It could range from visiting the sick, planting a tree or advocating for human rights. But apart from the benefits to the society, we most often miss the benefits it can have for the person who is volunteering. Here are some ways how volunteering can benefit you –

Learn new Skills
Volunteering can help us learn more skills and makes us aware of our hidden skills. We can help organize a fundraising event, do an awareness event, or teach students in a school. By doing this we can improve our goal setting, planning or budgeting skills. It also helps us to improve our decision making skills and contribute to personal change by affecting our beliefs about day to day behavior of people. If you always had a hobby and you wanted to know if you should pursue it, you can volunteer with your skills to see for yourself whether you enjoy doing it or not, or where you stand in that skill. For example, taking initiatives like ‘No Waste‘ and ‘Dandi March‘ has certainly made a huge difference to my people management and leadership skills.

Volunteer for Yourself

Volunteer for Yourself

Sense of Fulfillment
When we volunteer, we give our time and skills generously by choice. There is no anxiety and stress as we have made the decision all by ourself. Therefore, volunteering gives us the highest level of accomplishment and a sense of fulfillment. Whenever I have helped others, I have always felt joy and I think it is the same with all human beings. Even after working on something physically stressful while volunteering, people always feel stress-free, relaxed and more alive after doing it. And irrespective of the outcome, the knowledge of contributing to a good cause is always rewarding.

Wider Perspective
In our busy day to day lives, volunteering can help us create some stability in our lives. The confidence and experience gained from volunteering can be helpful in seeing workplace issues in a different perspective. We discover new traits of our personality and can reach for new levels of performance at the workplace too. For me, meeting people from different age groups and different professions has given me the ability to put my world in perspective with so much other stuff happening which I was totally unaware of earlier. It has also helped me improve my social and interpersonal skills. Volunteering can help anybody get out of the ‘rat race’ and create a balance in their lives.

Connecting with others
When you volunteer, you will meet new people from different walks and segments of the society. These contacts can be valuable in establishing business contacts or for seeking employment in the future. Meeting people and making new friends increase the feeling of relatedness with the community, and is rewarding intrinsically. People and societies depend on each other for survival but commercialism and consumerism have seen people getting more and more individualistic. What better way to connect and give something back to your community than volunteering.

Nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something

Nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something

“A candle loses nothing by lighting another” is a popular quote by James Keller. We can not give something (out of free will) without getting something in return. When we give our time and skills to another, it is like lighting a candle. We don’t lose anything, but gain more light (knowledge). Volunteering always leaves us richer in spirit, happiness, skills and takes away your problems, stress and anxiety. If you have not spend time volunteering till now, do so. It is certainly one of the things you must experience sooner than later. For volunteering opportunities, see this initiative (Pick A Fight) I am taking with a few of my friends.

Introducing Pick A Fight

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it” – Helen Keller

Today, we are living in a world full of joy and sorrows. While, at one end, we are making new progress with every passing day with breakthroughs in science and technology, we are still struggling from grave problems like poverty, corruption, child abuse, etc. All of us are fighting our own battle. A fight for survival, to earn more money, to ensure a better future for our family, and so on. Many individuals and organizations are also fighting for the greater good and issues which affect all of us as a society.

Pick a fight, Make a difference

Pick a fight, Make a difference

Pick a Fight is a platform to connect those who are fighting for a cause and looking for help with people who are willing to help. A fight could be an NGO fighting for women empowerment, a company working towards green drives like sapling planting, an individual taking an initiative in his locality, apartment, etc or a group of people (RWA, friends) who have come together to fight for some cause.

If you want to help and stand for a cause, Pick a Fight is the place to be. We aspire to have all the information of different fights people are fighting for.  It will be the one stop destination to seek help and offer help. Help could be in the form of giving your time to volunteer, giving away resources like old clothes or books, or donating money towards a cause.

Pick a Fight is the brainchild of Anupama Sharma, a software professional working in Bangalore. Here is what she has to say, in her own words –

“I had just come back from a wonderful day at an orphanage and was narrating the event to a friend when he exclaimed that he would have loved to be a part of it. He asked me the address of the orphanage and was surprised to find out that he had been living close to the orphanage all these years and did not even knew about it. That is when it occurred to me that there are ample people who want to help and many others who need help, and I saw that as an opportunity to connect them. Very soon two of my friends joined me, and I am sure many more will join in the coming days. Our objective is to create a new culture of giving and helping through PickaFight.”

I will be helping her to make Pick a Fight a success and inculcate a new culture of giving and helping. If you want to be a part of it or contribute in any way, contact Anupama at anupama@pickafight.in, Ketan at ketan@pickafight.in or myself at sumit@pickafight.in

You can find Pick A Fight on Facebook and Twitter. Like / Follow these pages to stay updated about our activities. Our website is all set for a launch on 15 May.

Why India’s urban development is important for the nation?

Sometime back, I had written an article on “Why India’s rural development is important for the nation?”. Now, through this article, I want to stress why our urban development is as important too. We have come a long way since independence in terms of urban economy growth. Urban economy now contributes upto 70% to the nation’s GDP, while this figure was 30% in 1960. In the last 50 years, all over the world cities has risen to become hubs of economic activity and certainly future growth is going to come from our cities.

But unfortunately, the growth and expansion of Indian cities has been unplanned and haphazard. Our cities today face challenges in meeting the demands of infrastructure and resources. The demand for clean water exceeds the supply by about 30%. Waste management systems are almost non-existent, and if they are there, heavily over-stressed with over 40% waste going uncollected. Eco-friendly waste disposal methods are only a dream and even government agencies and engineers are totally unaware about their technicalities. Around 22% of urban population lives in slums and around 25% is below the poverty line. Traffic congestion and pollution has increased like never before.

Infrastructure growth is one of the biggest challenges India faces today

Infrastructure growth is one of the biggest challenges India faces today

Clearly, we need to change not only the way our cities are managed, but also how they are planned. Planning for future cities and management of current cities only will result in livable cities which will have decent quality of life and equal opportunities to all citizens. Firstly, we should provide fast and low cost infrastructure for residents like housing, hospitals, schooling, transport and commercial centres. There should also be a provision of how to grow this infrastructure as cities grow in the future.

We must encourage high rise and high density cities to accommodate the continuous migration from villages to cities. While we have seen growth in apartments in cities like Noida, Gurgaon and Bangalore, most of them are for the upper middle class. There is an urgent need for builders to build affordable low cost housing solutions. The government can help the builders by providing tax rebates as incentives.

A normal scenario in all Indian cities

A normal scenario in all Indian cities

If we improve our roads and transport standards, our cities can grow horizontally as traveling time will reduce. Transport is like the backbone of a city. Poor transport limits mobility of its people which in turn hamper economic growth. Road capacity must be enhanced but it is not enough in itself. Road transport has to be supplemented by development of mass transit systems like metro rail, mono rail and bus services. Road widening and introducing separate lanes for buses is an important step which is required today in almost every city of India. Other transit systems like metro rail should be integrated with bus services like Hong Kong and Tokyo, as this will reduce travel times and improve efficiency for business and economy.

Undoubtedly, there is a lot to do to improve urban infrastructure, and huge amounts of money will be required to do this. It is impossible for the government to all of this by itself. It is therefore imperative private sector be involved heavily in infrastructure development activities with the government playing the role of a regulator. In Thailand and Malaysia, even sanitation systems are managed by private operators. Why can’t the same model work here? A lot of policy changes will also be required to change how local governments and municipal bodies work. The Mayor of a city is elected by councillors, and is powerless. The mayor should be elected directly by the people and should be given powers to manage and run cities efficiently.

Are we providing equal opportunities to all?

Are we providing equal opportunities to all?

To make sure all these systems work in a transparent and efficient manner, we must introduce ratings of municipalities of different cities, and some sort of comparative performance measurement system for officers. All this information should be in the public domain and open to scrutiny by the media and public. E-governance needs to be introduced and systems such as MIS (Management Information Systems) can be used to collate all information and improve efficiency of all services. How we manage our cities today will decide how our country will shape up tomorrow. We need to turn our cities into truly sustainable engines of growth for the whole country.

The Truth about India’s Young Population, and how it can be a boon or a bane?

Today, over 35% of our population is below the age of 20. By 2020, it is expected that 325 million people in India will reach working age, which will be the largest in the world. This will come at a time when the rest of the developed world will be faced with an ageing population. It is estimated that by 2020, US will be short of 17 million people of working age, China by 10 million, Japan by 9 million and Russia by 6 million. At the same time, India will have a surplus of 47 million working people. Even when compared to developing countries, Brazil’s working population is set to grow by 12%, China’s by 1%, Russia’s will decline by 18%, while ours will grow by 30%. This is the reason Goldman Sachs predicted that only India can maintain a 5% growth rate until 2050.

But are our youth unemployable?
Economic growth require not just a large working population, but people who are trained and skilled to work in different industries. Many industries have remarked that people coming out of colleges and universities in India are not employable and they have to give them skills training before they start their work. This adds strain on the industry. Our adult illiteracy levels are also a big concern, which stands at 39%. 25 million children are out of school in India, out of a total of 100 million out of school children in the world. We need to work on our policies to make sure those who are still in school and colleges get the best education and be ready for their opportunity when it arrives.

Youngistan - Will it mean a boon or a bane for us?

Youngistan - Will it mean a boon or a bane for us?

Demands of this population
With a huge working population will also come a huge consumption boom, as it has happened in China. China accounts for 20% of world’s consumption of aluminum, 35% of the global demand of steel and coal, and 45% of the worldwide cement purchase. The future demands of China and India’s population will put a lot of burden to the resources of these two countries. How these two countries manage resources like water, cultivable land, oil and energy needs will be critical. The demands on the environment cannot be overlooked either. If we follow the same model as followed by American and European development, environmental deterioration will end up destroying the whole planet. Global Warming is already a big problem. The challenge for India will not only be economic growth, but also make it sustainable and bearable for the environment.

Taking care of our population
Our infrastructure today is no way capable of taking proper care of our ever increasing population. Human development must go hand in hand with population growth. More than 25% of our urban population lives without sanitation and 24% lives without access to tap water. We need 66,000 primary schools and 3000 new health centres every year to cater to our population growth. Food production also has to be increased by 3% every year to meet their needs.

We can’t ignore the ill-effects of population growth
India cannot afford to ignore what will happen with unsustainable economic and population growth. We need to use our technological skills and replace our age-old systems with innovations to reduce the resource burden. We need innovative and sustainable solutions in energy, transportation, sanitation, manufacturing, and agriculture. We are a nation of great talent, and we stand before times which might be our big opportunity to take the leap in the world order but we also face significant challenges. If we take all this into consideration NOW, and frame policies and act responsibly, I am sure we are capable of transforming this huge young population into a boon rather than a bane.