Sunday, December 5, 2010

Much ado abt nothing !!

Much a do about nothing !! …..seems to be the era of microCredit bashing . Some unscrupulous guys in the mFI segment went berserk making a quick buck . Fortunately they were regulated entities; yeah !! regulated by Central Bank. But regulation stopped at prescribing  IRAC norms and capital adequacy , as RBI never bothered to do anything or didn't watch what they were doing.... See what happened , the mess !!....excessive opaqueness, excessive charges to pay excessive pay/ ESPOS, excessive leverage , excessive growth and resultant poor client excesses   ...................... as the Ex RBI Governor said an Indian subprime.
Now all about microCredit has become bad , even the NGO minded guys, purveying small credit or say meeting diminutive credit needs of their clients are likely get regulated becos of the bad guys.The blame game is on ....that is good , i told you , we had warned etc etc
God, even the media is on an overdrive, every Tom , Dick and Harry who has not read about microCredit and micro Finance or even seen it at work has been writing pages about it !!
Sad to see one of my favorite writers like Gurucharan Das, write about the subject in TOI dated 5 Dec 2010, sadly it was a  wee too rubbish , perhaps he seemed to have some equity in a profit earning MFI......sadly
"sub apnnee danadee pe hai"
Even the father of microCredit and Nobel laureate Prof Yunus has not been spared – calling it the wikileaks of microCredit , he seems to have siphoned donor money about 12 yrs back to a sister concern from Grameen Bank….the media is getting too unethical and unprincipled, and NOOOT learning its lessons even after they were exposed of being lobbyists and kingpins with the infamous RADIO-ISOTOPE "RADIA tapes"…. They should have seen the reply that Prof Yunus gave to the donor agency before publishing the same in the press. I feel Prof is also a target ...becos he was the one who called mFIs as Kabuliwallas, for their excessive charges on the poor client, that too 10 years back , when he came New Delhi for the microCredit summit as a plenary session panelist - During that time i did see the SKS guys as unknown entities,  demonstrating potential use of  technology using cards in a stall outside the Asoka Hall  !!

A dunia toda oot pandang lagtha hai !!
God save …cheers
Suran   

No comments:

Works at NABARD for poor HH / was Research Affiliate at CDS, Tvm / was Visiting Faculty on microFinance for MBA students NMIMS, Mumbai.