Reader\'s Digest IN 02.2020

Chandra Shekhar Ghosh offers millions of poverty-

stricken Indians the means to reclaim their futures

C

handra shekhar Ghosh,

59, was first confronted with

dehumanizing hunger as a

young NGO worker. He was

often dispatched to the re-

mote districts of Rangpur in Bangla-

desh, where he found villagers who

slept for three days in a row without

any meals. Distressed, he had handed

over a 50-taka note to help. Riding back

on his bicycle, he was haunted by the

predicament of these folk, trapped in a

cycle of poverty.

“I figured donations don’t help;

income generation was the only

way to pull people out of poverty,”

Ghosh tells us, sitting in the plush

headquarters of Bandhan Bank in

Kolkata. Chandra Shekhar Ghosh,

today, is the managing director and

CEO of the organization (whose

business runs to `1,20,364 crore),

which is a champion of financial inclu-

sion with its microfinance arm, which

aims to change millions of lives through

income generation.

Born to a humble Bengali family of

Tripura, Ghosh helped his father run

a small sweet shop in his boyhood. By

the time he graduated, his father had

passed away, leaving him—the eldest

of six siblings—to run the family.

A few years later, during a door-to-

door health campaign in West Bengal’s

Purulia district, Ghosh visited a young

mother. She was boiling rice in a make-

shift oven in front of her shack. “Her in-

fant daughter, who played next to her,

was picking up mud and putting it in

her mouth,” recalls Ghosh. He tried to

explain to her that ingesting dirt would

make her baby sick, but the woman

looked distracted. When he asked her

if she had registered anything, she

DREAMERS

Banking on Hope

BySanghamitra Chakraborty

20 february 2020

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