Credit should be accepted as human right: Yunus

Kolkata, February 13:

Bangladeshi Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus wants the rural population in the Indian subcontinent to take a sip from the ocean of money around them that they have no access to through conventional systems of banking.

“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,” he said at a gathering here organised by the South Asia Research Society to felicitate him yesterday. “We have reached where co-nventional banks did not. The banking system of the country does not even recognise these people. I think credit should be accepted as a human right,” said Yunus, who set up the Grameen Bank way back in 1976 when he was Head of the Rural Economics Programme at the University of Chittagong.

“Conventional banks will simply not lend 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, nothing. My simple rationality 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 Yunus.

“They are paying back because for the first time they got an opportunity which no one earlier gave them,” said Yunus. “We have given a 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.

Emphasising the need for micro-credit, the system he developed, Yunus said, “We can create a local economy with Grameen Bank. People in my country had a choice between Grameen Bank and moneylenders. So they cho-se Grameen Bank.” In 1983, the Grameen Bank project was transformed into an independent bank by government legislation.