C S Ghosh: Tied to the bottom of the pyramid

Friday, April 4, 2014

Chandra Shekhar Ghosh has come a long way – from Tripura to Bangladesh to West Bengal to now the national scene. Themicrofinance organisation Bandhan, which he founded in 2001 and helped grow, has won the right to become a full-fledged commercial bank that can and will have its branches from Srinagar to Thiruvananthapuram in the not too distant future.

A couple of years ago, when I first met him and asked why he was not tomtomming Bandhan’s journey to the top of the microfinance league, he said he preferred to maintain a low profile and get on with the work. When on my first visit to Bandhan’s multi-storied head office in Kolkata’s information technology hub in Salt Lake, I noted he had some of the best-known global names as neighbours, he readily admitted that the real estate was a bargain he was able to pick up when the property market plummeted after 2008.

Ghosh, now in his mid-fifties, started his professional journey after postgraduate studies in Dhaka University with one of the best known and oldest non-government organisations of Bangladesh, BRAC. If that was an introduction on how to get things done at the bottom of the pyramid, on moving to West Bengal he got a real idea of what needed doing to address the poverty all around.

Source: Business Standard (link opens in a new window)

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Base of the Pyramid, microfinance, poverty alleviation