The microfinance sector has been in the news for reasons that don't do its image any good. There is a growing sense that the sector's spirit is being sapped by greed. Promoters of microfinance institutions (MFIs) are seen as amassing personal fortunes and paying managers unrealistically huge sums in compensation. In sharp focus is the recent IPO of SKS Microfinance which has raised $ 358 million from the stock markets and was oversubscribed 13 times. The boardroom battles that followed have given the impression that SKS is far removed from the goals of social justice and credit for the poor with which it originally set out as an NGO. It is the search for commercial viability and capital that puts growing MFIs on a difficult path. The bigger they get, the bigger are their needs. But will making microfinance obscenely profitable actually help in addressing the problem of poverty and the needs of small rural livelihoods? Should SKS' windfall from an IPO be seen as a measure of the enterprise's success or an intimation of the uncertain times that lie ahead for microfinance? While IPOs are a new phenomenon, the core problems of the sector continue to cry out for solutions. Are interest rates too high and should they be capped? Should MFIs be placed under closer government scrutiny? In the search for size and scale, has there been over-lending? Are some MFIs coming down so heavily on small borrowers that they have been committing suicide in anguish? ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
A new confidence suffuses the offices of Prabhat Khabar in Ranchi. Circulation has crossed half a million daily. Advertisement revenues have surged. Its eighth edition, in colour, has rolled out. The newspaper has never known such success though it has been number one in Jharkhand for quite a while. What makes these gains even sweeter is that barely two years ago Prabhat Khabar feared being crushed by big Hindi newspapers out to capture the Jharkhand market. At stake currently is an estimated Rs 100 crore in advertising rising 20 per cent each year. Now, not only has competition been stopped in its tracks, but Prabhat Khabar has also made serious forays into the larger surrounding market of Bihar and strengthened its presence in West Bengal. A homegrown team of journalists and managers have shown uncommon savvy. They have been nurturing Prabhat Khabar since 1989 and have strong local reputations. But getting the better of three powerful national dailies – Hindustan, Dainik Jagran and most recently Dainik Bhaskar – puts them in a super league. The interest in Jharkhand is defined by Ranchi. It has gone from being a small town to the bustling capital city of the new mineral-rich state of Jharkhand which was carved out of Bihar nine years ago. Shopping malls, global brands, young people in jeans thronging coffee shops, the opening of educational institutions are intimations of a valuable market in the making. Also read : ‘Ultimately, content is king' ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It is late evening and a Marathi class in underway at the Adarsh Nagar Night School in Worli. I watch Jiten Parab, 16, engrossed in reading from his textbook. Just an hour ago, he was intently checking out the innards of an old Maruti car. Jiten, son of a farmer from a village in Malwan district, says he's been fascinated by machines ever since he began living in Mumbai, seven years ago. So he works at a motor workshop from 9 am to 6 pm, Monday to Saturday and half of Sunday trying to figure out what makes machines tick. He then attends school after work, six nights a week and does his homework before he sleeps. That's a lot of hard work but with simplicity and honesty he says: “I want to do a course at an Industrial Training Institute (ITI) so that I can get a good job.” It is this passionate aspiration of students for a better life that inspired Nikita Ketkar to resign her government job and set up Masoom (Innocence) in January 2008. Her outfit now runs an intervention programme for night schools. “It is sheer self-motivation, a desire to do something with their lives that brings these youngsters here. But they receive a very poor quality of education. Notebooks, textbooks, access to scientific laboratories and in some cases, even chalk, are not provided. I felt they deserved better,” says Nikita. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
In a landmark move the National Environment Appellate Authority (NEAA) on 30th August revoked the environment clearance granted to the French multinational, Lafarge, for its Rs 900 crore greenfield cement project in Himachal Pradesh by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). Lafarge is considered the world's largest cement producer. The cancellation of its environment clearance comes close on the heels of the company being embroiled in yet another controversy in Meghalaya over land and forest issues. Twenty-one local tribes and the Shella Action Committee, an NGO, had approached the Supreme Court alleging the French company had obtained environment clearance by falsely declaring forested areas as wasteland. The company was accused of displacing local tribals by using dubious means. On 9 April, the Supreme Court had ordered Lafarge to meet additional conditions for mining, including a deposit of Rs 55 crore towards Net Present Value (NPV) of the forest land to be used for welfare projects for tribals. Importantly, the judgment in the Himachal case came after a member of the NEAA visited the Lafarge Cement and Limestone Mines' proposed project site on 23 June to assess the feasibility of the environment clearance granted to it on 8 June last year. This was the first visit of its kind by the NEAA to the state of Himachal Pradesh. There is little doubt amongst locals that it played a crucial role in the final decision. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
A child going to school fell into an abandoned borewell in the Madras Port area in 2000. His school bag, flung nearby, alerted passersby. A huge crowd gathered. Local television crews started reporting the incident live. But nobody knew how to rescue the child. The little one eventually died. More than a dozen such tragedies happen in India every year. There is concern among people so TV channels give these incidents a lot of coverage. But public memory is short. After a while all is forgotten and the administration too drifts into slumber. Tamil Nadu now has a team of trained youngsters well equipped to handle such a crisis. Whenever they hear of a child trapped in a borewell their leader gets into emergency mode. His team is raring to go. “Shall we rush to the spot, sir,” ask team members eagerly. But their leader advises caution. “No. There is a legal dimension to the issue. We cannot intervene unless the administration invites us to.” Dr V Anand, 49, an ENT surgeon, is the brain behind this rescue mission. He runs two hospitals in Pollachi and Coimbatore. Anand has trained eight engineering students and equipped them with mobile phones and a jeep to get to the spot. But, incredibly, the team hasn't been called even once because of government apathy. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
IT has been shown by Prabhat Khabar that credible information and personal integrity can be the basis for commercial success in the media. This is an achievement because these are times when editorial content is for sale and managements are happy to allow advertisers to define what journalists do. The malaise is everywhere: open the leading newspapers and magazines, switch on just about any TV channel. When AR Rahman comes on prime time English news and is asked by the anchor about the new car he has bought and he says it is a Toyota we know what is going on. In much the same category are campaigns to save the environment. Or carefully structured shows in which business tycoons and their wives talk about their social concerns and the number of girl children they are educating. At a yet more base level is election coverage which is paid for by politicians. But Prabhat Khabar has been different and in the process built itself into a profitable enterprise in its home territory of Jharkhand and newer markets emerging in the eastern region. For two decades now, Prabhat Khabar has taken the difficult road of telling a story as it should be told. It has raised issues of social justice and development. It has taken on governments and exposed corruption. It has walked away from dubious advertising revenue. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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In Kashmir a government job is considered to be heavenly. So it takes courage to quit and move on. That's what Nusrat Jahan Ara did and she has now emerged as one of Kashmir's most successful entrepreneurs, a role model for the youth to aspire to. With 10 years of experience in the flower business, Nusrat is the proud state franchisee of Petals n Ferns, a leading national chain of fresh flower stores. She is the pioneer of the cut flower industry in Kashmir. Nusrat has excelled in a business which was once considered to be non-productive by most people. Nusrat is from Dadoora village in south Kashmir's Pulwama district. She resigned from her job as community organizer in the Jammu Development Authority since she had set her sights on being an entrepreneur. “I was not satisfied with my job. I wanted to do something big,” she explains. “So I decided to quit and start my own business. I wanted to start a novel business. The cut-flower business attracted me. I feel proud of my decision. Today, I have many more goals to achieve,” says Nusrat. She began her business in 2000 with literally no financial support.“I joined a new sector. My family supported me through thick and thin. Without their encouragement I may not have succeeded in getting to where I am now,” says the entrepreneur. She said parents should help their children chose their careers and support them in their decisions. They should not impose their ambitions on their children. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
LUNCH is about to begin at the Pardada Pardadi Education Society (PPES) school in Anupshahr, a village some 40 km from Bulandshahar in west Uttar Pradesh (UP). Students on kitchen duty lay out hundreds of steel plates in long, neat rows for the midday meal. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
We, the government and the private sector, had a compact. The role of business was to focus on jobs, generating income and paying taxes. The government was to take care of security, maintaining law and order, provisioning social infrastructure, etc. Over the years, this compact has been broken. The government has found it exceedingly difficult to keep its promises. The Public Private Partnership (PPP) mantra has been one way to co-opt the private sector into the arena of government responsibility. A more recent manifestation of this trend is the proposed move to make it mandatory for firms with over Rs 5 crores profit per year to spend 2 per cent of their average net profit on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. There are other criteria too that are applicable for the mandatory CSR by firms but one gets the government intent – bail us out. And for good measure, if any firm does not have adequate profits or is not in a position to spend the prescribed amount on CSR activities, its directors are required to state the reasons in the annual report. A mandated CSR regime is about to dawn on us. Mandatory CSR for business is not a great idea. It is likely to result in firms fudging the activities (to ensure compliance) and having their own creative interpretation as to what constitutes CSR. Further shareholders are likely to get short shrift since the primary purpose of business is to maximize shareholder wealth ethically and legally. Yes, they are to do it with appropriate social consciousness but many firms have their own way of addressing this through their current CSR activities done in a voluntary manner. By mandating it, the government is using its significant cleft to get firms to fill up the pothole created by sarkari failure on the social front. This is not a good sign since once introduced what is to stop future governments from effectively outsourcing their responsibility to the private sector by mandating higher percentages? ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
The effect was electric: pulsating music, powerful lyrics and a message of resistance. Rustic Punjabi songs of revolution merged with dancehall and hip hop to create an irresistible blend on a balmy evening at the Max Mueller-Goethe Institute in Delhi. The iconic hero of Punjab, Bant Singh, folk singer and activist with the Kisan Mukti Morcha sang passionately with Taru Dalmia, a young musician of dancehall and hip hop. An unlikely audience of Dalit activists and faces from Delhi's nightlife scene listened, bridging the gap between classes and masses. The event marked the launch of Word Sound and Power: the Bant Singh Project, a collaboration between young musicians and the revolutionary singer Bant Singh. It created new music, new sounds and a film, thereby carrying Bant Singh's message to a youthful, urban audience. It all started when Samrat B, musician and DJ, frustrated with the music scene in Delhi began thinking of how he could change the vacuous music young people jived with. Samrat came across an article on Bant Singh and the story stayed with him. Two years later, when Max Mueller mooted the idea of a a project that would combine a new media arts project with a socially relevant one, Samrat thought of Bant Singh. Dalit farmer, activist and singer from Jabbar village in Mansa district of Punjab, Bant Singh is an extraordinary person. He worked on farms and nurtured his love for radical poetry and music. In 2000, his young daughter was raped by upper caste men from the village. Bant Singh took the courageous step of taking the men to court. Such a step was unprecedented in a village where Dalits were historically oppressed. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last year, on 23 March, activist and intellectual Smitu Kothari, 59, died of a sudden heart attack in Delhi, leaving his family, friends and admirers stupefied and shocked. But they were able to overcome the abjectly tragic moment of his sudden departure by creating a long evening of multiple narratives: poetry, memories, songs, speeches, anecdotes, including some intimate and obsessive idiosyncrasies of Smitu shared in a public space by his brothers, equally eminent scholars and activists, Milon and Ashish Kothari. If I remember correctly, they spoke of Smitu's passion to dismantle clocks, radios, sundry techie apparatus, only to re-fix them again. In later years, he was doing much of that, but the terrain had shifted to the multiple resistance zones against the mindless use of technology, political and money power to ravage ancient and indigenous ecologies and communities in India and elsewhere. This was Smitu's new obsession, in word, text, music, feeling, image and thought, to dismantle this brutish and short mindset of total domination of the contemporary political economy of development. And to re-fix it with a new paradigm of hope. Development is not one-dimensional, said Smitu, it can't be driven from above by the vested interests of profit lobbies over the ravaged bodies of forests, rivers, mountains and living communities with oral traditions, great social histories, and unfinished memories of bloody and non-violent resistances. No, this paradigm shift should mark the realm of both, the model of small is beautiful versus gigantism and mass displacement, as much as a creative, beautiful, humane alternative of sustainable, organic, communitarian and egalitarian model of development. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ About Us | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | ©2007 Civil Society....................................... .Webmaster Vishwanathan ( vishu4@rediffmail.com ) |
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