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Outstanding social entrepreneur, visionary leader, marketing strategist and seer of sorts in microfinance, Vijay Mahajan, walks the course of micro finance in India, from the traditional Tacavvi loans granted to the poor, to being a means of empowerment to the underprivileged. |
To give an understanding of the gender dynamics at play in organisations, and how these dynamics affect those who get to be leaders, Professor Deborah M. Kolb was at the ISB, teaching a course in Gender and Leadership. Kolb is a Professor for Women and Leadership at the Simmons School of Management in Boston, USA, and is faculty affiliate for the Centre for Gender in Organization (CGO), the School’s international resource centre.
In a face to face with ‘ISBInsight’, she looks closely at the different models of gender and leadership and how women confront and navigate through challenges in their leadership roles. This is followed by an article written by Professor Kolb reproduced from the CGO Newsletter.
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If microfinance be defined generically as small transactions (loans or savings), then, it dates back to thousands of years. However, if used in the more contemporary sense, like it has been used since the mid ‘70s, then it is about twenty years old in India. If we think of microfinance more narrowly as micro credit, and if we further define micro credit as small loans to economically disadvantaged households, then the history of microfinance in India is reasonably long, as is of the state intervention of microfinance in India.
During the Mughals and the Raj
During the Mughal times, land revenue collection became monetized and simultaneously grew a tradition of the state providing assistance to farmers in the years of drought. When the British moved into the role of land revenue collection, they inherited the same system. There existed a concept of ‘tacavvi’ loans, which simply meant loans given against land revenue collections.
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By the 1860s, when several famines and peasant rebellions took place, the British colonial authorities were concerned. The first formal state intervention surfaced as early as 1866, during the Maratha Peasant Rebellion. Indeed, India was one of the first countries to experiment with the cooperative credit system. In 1904, the first Cooperative Societies Act was enacted. Thus the history of state intervention in microfinance is formally over a hundred years old. Here the word microfinance is used, almost synonymous to loans to small farmers, as farming was the predominant livelihood in the country for a long time. There was very little else that required microfinance. The traders living in cities were already wealthy people. A few clusters of weavers and other artisans, who worked under the ‘jajmaani’ system, were given material in kind and got wages in return. So they never really had working capital requirements.For a long time the only people who needed credit were the farmers.
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