Vijay Mahajan

Last updated

Vijay Mahajan is the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies. [1]

Contents

Mahajan was the founder of the BASIX Social Enterprise Group which is engaged in livelihood promotion and supported the livelihoods of over three million low income households in over 20 states in India and six developing countries. [2]

Mahajan founded PRADAN, a well-known Indian non-government organization (NGO), in 1982, and worked at PRADAN till the end of 1990. [3] He established VikaSoko Development Exchange in 1991 jointly with his Woodrow Wilson School/Princeton classmates, Thomas Fisher, a British citizen and Geoffey Onegi-Obel, an Ugandan citizen, worked on social enterprises in India and East Africa. They ran VikaSoko till 1996, when Vijay established the first three entities of what later became the BASIX Social Enterprise Group.

Early life

Vijay Mahajan was born in India in October 1954. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1970 for a five-year bachelor's degree in technology, specialising in Electrical Engineering. He graduated from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1981, earning a master's degree in business management. [4] In 1988, he went to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA, as a Mid-Career Fellow for a year.

Career

Philips

Vijay's first job was at the electronics multinational company Philips in a marketing position. He worked there for four years, travelling mostly in the small towns and rural parts of the Northeastern states, with headquarter in Guwahati for two years. Later he was moved to Kolkata and got exposed to the eastern Indian states of India - Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal for two years.

PRADAN

After his MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, inspired by Professors Ravi Matthai, Ranjit Gupta and Kamla Chowdhry, Vijay joined a Gandhian NGO, ASSEFA in Bihar in mid 1982, working to settle landless poor people on Bhoodan (gifted land) they had received. This involved projects of land and water development, starting agriculture and adding allied activities. After turning around the initial project in Gaya, he set up new projects in Jamui and Deoghar districts and then many more in other northern states.[ citation needed ]

Mahajan sought the help of ASSEFA staff to work on the idea of professionals working at the grassroots, assisting NGOs and poor communities in development action. This led to the birth of PRADAN or "professional assistance for development action". Pradan in Hindi means "to give in exchange" as against dan which means "to give in charity".[ citation needed ]

In October 1983, PRADAN was established as a non-profit society and was funded by the Ford Foundation. Vijay became its first executive director. Continuing his work with ASSEFA, Vijay inducted a number of young professionals from the IITs, IIMs and top agricultural universities to work with ASSEFA as well as other NGOs such as MYRADA, Seva Mandir, Anand Niketan Ashram, Mahila Jagaran Samiti and Gram Vikas, Orissa. By 1986, PRADAN began its own direct work with rural poor communities, starting with the tribals of the Kesla block in Hoshangabad district of Madhya pradesh to the dalit carcass flayers of Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh to the tasar silk reares of Santhal Parganas of Bihar (now Jharkhand). Vijay topped up this flush of innovative projects by setting up three separate types of collaborative projects – for wasteland development with small NGOs in Purulia, West Bengal; for income-generation with ITC near its cigarette factories in Munger, Bihar and Saharanpur, UP; and with the local panchayats and district/block level government agencies in the Kishangarh Bas block of Alwar district in Rajasthan.[ citation needed ]

In keeping with the leadership norms then prevalent in his alma mater IIMA, he stepped down from the executive directorship after serving a five-year term. Deep Joshi, who had joined PRADAN in 1986, took over as the second executive director of PRADAN. Vijay then went for a year's fellowship to the Princeton University. On his return, he worked in PRADAN for a year and a half. He spent the initial few months with Mr Laxmi Chand Jain and Smt Ela Bhatt, who were both senior development activists then serving as members of the Planning Commission of India.

VikaSoko

In 1992, Vijay was joined by Thomas Fisher, whom he had met in Princeton and along with whom and a third colleague, Geoffrey Onegi-Obel, and they together established a US registered non-profit NGO called VikaSoko (a word synthesised from Vikas meaning development in Hindi and Soko meaning marketplace in Swahili). They then offered services as development consultants and researchers and also as trainers, but with a focus exclusively on the issue of livelihoods.

Their first assignment was for the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Government-in-Exile in Dharamsala, whom they worked with to produce the first Integrated Development Plan for the 120,000 Tibetan community in exile. [5] Subsequently, they carried out a study of the Rural Non-Farm Sector in India, [6] for the Indian National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC). Another study was of the SEWA Bank [7] for the Ford Foundation and a third one of financial services for the rural poor and women, [8] for the World Bank.

BASIX

In 1996, realising the need to attract mainstream financial resources, Vijay conceptualised BASIX, [9] [10] [11] a new generation institution devoted to promoting a large number of livelihoods for the poor and women on a sustainable basis. BASIX [12] [13] established Bhartiya Samruddhi Finance Ltd (BSFL), which was among the first microfinance companies in the world to attract commercial debt and equity investments, both internationally and from within India. It also offers a range of services including savings and insurance, agricultural, livestock and non-farm enterprise development, and institutional development to rural producers and their groups. [14] [13] Some of his early colleagues at BASIX were BL Parthasarathy, Ashok Singha, Sankar Datta, MS Sriram, and D Sattaiah.

Institution and Sector Building Roles

In 1998, jointly with Ela Bhatt Vijay co-founded Sa-Dhan, the association of community development financial institutions in 1999 with Ela Bhatt of SEWA. He was the founding President of MicroFinance Institutions Network (MFIN) of India in 2009. [15] In 2010 he was elected vice-chair of the Global Agenda Council on Social Entrepreneurship of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Davos, along with Prof Greg Dees as Chair. [16] In 2012, Vijay was elected as chair of the board of the World Bank's Consulative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), Washington DC.

Policy Advisory and Board Roles

Vijay was a member of the Committee on Financial Sector Reforms, chaired by Raghuram Rajan and also of the C. Rangarajan Committee on Financial Inclusion. Vijay serves on the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority, and the Micro Finance Development and Equity Fund. He is the Principal Advisor to the Government of Rajasthan on Livelihoods.

He served for several years on the Boards of various NGOs including Association for Sarva Seva Farms (ASSEFA), Gram Vikas, ARAVALI, Development Support Centre a. He also served on the boards of management institutions including the Indian Institute of Health Management Research, the Institute of Rural Management Anand and the Indian Institute of Forest Management.

Vijay has been an advisor to the Planning Commission, Government of India, the state governments of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Sikkim, and to RBI and NABARD. He was the Principal Advisor on Livelihoods to the Government of Rajasthan (2004-2010) and in that capacity helped conceptualise the Rajasthan Mission on Livelihoods, [17] which later became the Rajasthan Skill and Livelihood Development Corporation [18] in 2011.

Internationally, Vijay served on the board of Oxfam America from 1995 to 1998 and from 2006 to 2012 on the executive committee(ExCom) of the World Bank's Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a global consortium of 33 bilateral, multilateral and private donor organisations on microfinance . In his last two years he was elected the chair of the CGAP ExCom and in that capacity helped to move CGAP agenda from microfinance to financial inclusion. He was vice-chair, along with late Prof Greg Dees as chair, of the Global Agenda Council on Social Entrepreneurship, World Economic Forum, Davos, 2009–2010.

Apart from founding and serving till September 2016 on the boards of all the BASIX Group's social enterprises, Vijay served as an independent director on the boards of several social enterprises and financial inclusion enterprises, including as the promoter of the Krishna Bhima Samruddhi Local Area Bank Ltd (KBS Bank) and Sarvodaya Nano Finance Ltd. He was also on the investment committee of the Aavishkaar India Micro Venture Capital Fund in its first three years (2003–2006) and is on the investment committee of the Menterra Social Impact Fund.

Positions and recognitions

Source: [19]

Vijay [20] has been listed in “60 Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs” by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship at the World Economic Forum, Davos, 2002; "India's 50 Most Powerful People" by BusinessWeek , 2009 and among "the twenty people who will reform India during this decade", by the Indian Express, 2011 [21]

Awards conferred on him include:

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microcredit</span> Small loans to impoverished borrowers

Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment, and a verifiable credit history. It is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty. Many recipients are illiterate, and therefore unable to complete paperwork required to get conventional loans. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million people held microloans that totaled nearly US$40 billion. Grameen Bank reports that repayment success rates are between 95 and 98 percent. The first economist who had invented the idea of micro loans was The Very Reverend Jonathan Swift in the 1720’s. Microcredit is part of microfinance, which provides a wider range of financial services, especially savings accounts, to the poor. Modern microcredit is generally considered to have originated with the Grameen Bank founded in Bangladesh in 1983 by their current Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus. Many traditional banks subsequently introduced microcredit despite initial misgivings. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit. As of 2012, microcredit is widely used in developing countries and is presented as having "enormous potential as a tool for poverty alleviation." Microcredit is a tool that can possibly be helpful to reduce feminization of poverty in developing countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microfinance</span> Provision of microloans to poor entrepreneurs and small businesses

Microfinance consists of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings and checking accounts; microinsurance; and payment systems, among other services. Microfinance services are designed to reach excluded customers, usually poorer population segments, possibly socially marginalized, or geographically more isolated, and to help them become self-sufficient. ID Ghana is an example of a microfinance institution.

A person's livelihood refers to their "means of securing the basic necessities of life". Livelihood is defined as a set of activities essential to everyday life that are conducted over one's life span. Such activities could include securing water, food, fodder, medicine, shelter, clothing. An individual's livelihood involves the capacity to acquire aforementioned necessities in order to satisfy the basic needs of themselves and their household. The activities are usually carried out repeatedly and in a manner that is sustainable and providing of dignity. For instance, a fisherman's livelihood depends on the availability and accessibility of fish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development</span> Government owned All India Financial Institution and Regulatory Body

The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) is an All India Financial Institution (AIFI) and an apex Supervisory Body for overall supervision of Regional Rural Banks, State Cooperative Banks and District Central Cooperative Banks in India. It was established under the NABARD Act 1981 passed by the Parliament of India. It is fully owned by Government of India and functions under the Department of Financial Services (DFS) under the Ministry of Finance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BASIX (India)</span>

BASIX is an institution concerning the promotion of livelihood established in 1996 in India. It is headquartered in Hyderabad, Telangana. Around 2010 it's NBFC arm raised funds from private equity investors and declared bankruptcy after couple of years.

Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited or BFIL is a banking & finance company (NBFC), licensed by the Reserve Bank of India. It was founded in 1997 by Vikram Akula, who served as its executive chair until working. The company's mission is to provide financial services to the poor under the premise that providing financial service to poor borrowers helps to alleviate poverty. In 2011, the company operated across 11 Indian states.

Financial inclusion is the availability and equality of opportunities to access financial services. It refers to processes by which individuals and businesses can access appropriate, affordable, and timely financial products and services - which include banking, loan, equity, and insurance products. It provides paths to enhance inclusiveness in economic growth by enabling the unbanked population to access the means for savings, investment, and insurance towards improving household income and reducing income inequality

Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) is a company registered under the Companies Act, 1956 of India, engaged in the business of loans and advances, acquisition of shares, stock, bonds, hire-purchase insurance business or chit-fund business, but does not include any institution whose principal business is that of agriculture, industrial activity, purchase or sale of any goods or providing any services and sale/purchase/construction of immovable property.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deep Joshi</span> Indian activist

Deep Joshi is an Indian social worker and NGO activist and a recipient of the Magsaysay award in 2009. He is recognised for his leadership in bringing professionalism to the NGO movement in India. He co-founded a non-profit organisation, Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN), of which he was the Executive Director till 2007. He was awarded the 2009 Magsaysay award for Community Leadership for his work for "development of rural communities". He is also a recipient of the civilian honour of Padma Shri.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microcredit for water supply and sanitation</span>

Microcredit for water supply and sanitation is the application of microcredit to provide loans to small enterprises and households in order to increase access to an improved water source and sanitation in developing countries. While most investments in water supply and sanitation infrastructure are financed by the public sector, investment levels have been insufficient to achieve universal access. Commercial credit to public utilities was limited by low tariffs and insufficient cost-recovery. Microcredits are a complementary or alternative approach to allow the poor to gain access to water supply and sanitation in the aforementioned regions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microfinance Information Exchange</span>

Microfinance Information Exchange, Inc. was a non-profit organization that provided market data and intelligence on financial service providers catering to low-income populations around the world. Founded by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) and sponsored by the Citi Foundation, CGAP, the Mastercard Foundation, MetLife Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others, MIX had offices in Washington DC, New York, Lima (Peru), Baku (Azerbaijan), Dakar (Senegal), and Hyderabad (India). MIX's mission was to provide data analytics to empower decision-makers - socially responsible investors, policy makers and financial services providers - to build an inclusive financial services ecosystem. Since its founding in 2002, MIX had built the digital information infrastructure needed to bring greater transparency to financial sectors serving low-income populations in emerging markets, including providing market data on over 3,000 financial services providers (FSPs). In 2016, MIX shifted its strategy to help improve the information flow in other segments of financial inclusion, like smallholder agricultural finance, fintech, digital financial services (DFS) and green energy finance. In May 2020, MIX became a unit of the Center for Financial Inclusion, a thinktank housed at Accion.

Poverty in Sri Lanka is 24.8% of the population as of July 1, 2024 Sri Lanka's life expectancy and literacy rate are nearly on par with those of developed countries, and even top the rankings for the South Asia region. While all these indicate that Sri Lanka should be experiencing a high standard of living, until recently it has only ranked in the medium category of the Human Development Index (HDI). This is despite the fact that Sri Lanka has been experiencing moderate growth in its GDP averaging 5.5 per annum between 2006 and 2009. One of the reasons is due to its relatively low GDP per capital;. The Sri Lankan government has been successful in reducing poverty from 15.2% on 2006 to 8.9% in 2010, urban poverty was reduced from 6.7 to 5.3% while rural poverty was reduced from 15.7 to 9.5%, and the nation has made significant progress towards achieving Millennium Development Goals on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.

The SIDBI foundation for Microcredit (SFMC) is an Indian financial division that provides bulk loans to microfinance institutions (MFIs) in India. It is a division of Indian governments Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI). In practice, it acts as an oversight over MFIs which are the intermediaries between the retail borrowers consisting of poor people and individual borrowers living in rural areas or urban slums and the public sector development finance institutions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shoaib Sultan Khan</span>

Shoaib Sultan Khan NI is one of the pioneers of rural development programmes in Pakistan. As a CSP Officer, he worked with the Government of Pakistan for 25 years, later on he served Geneva based Aga Khan Foundation for 12 years, then UNICEF and UNDP for 14 years. Since his retirement, he has been involved with the Rural Support Programmes (RSPs) of Pakistan full-time, on voluntary basis. Today, the Rural Support Programmes have helped form 297,000 community organisations in 110 districts including two Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana</span>

The Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pari Yojana (RGMVP) is the flagship program of Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust, a registered non-profit institution, working for poverty reduction, women empowerment, and rural development in Uttar Pradesh, India, since 2002. RGMVP believes that "the poor have a strong desire and innate ability to overcome poverty." It aims to organize poor rural women into community institutions and promotes financial inclusion, health care, livelihood enhancement, education, and the environment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sankar Datta</span> Biography of Sankar Datta

Sankar Datta is a development worker who has spent his life searching for a better way to Serve people of India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Skill India</span> Government of India initiative

Skill India or the National Skills Development Mission of India is a campaign launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is managed by the National Skills Development Corporation of India.

The Raghuram Rajan Committee on Financial Sector Reforms was a committee constituted by the Government of India in 2007 for proposing the next generation of financial sector reforms in India. It was chaired by University of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan who had earlier been the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. The committee, in its report titled A Hundred Small Steps, recommended broad-based reforms across the financial sector, arguing that instead of focusing "on a few large, and usually politically controversial steps", India must "take a hundred small steps in the same direction".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VFS Capital</span> Indian non-banking financial company

VFS Capital Limited formerly known as Village Financial Services Ltd (VFS), is headquartered in Kolkata, was incorporated on 28 June 1994, as a private limited company before it got its present name.

CGAP is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that promotes financial inclusion. As an international public-private partnership, it is supported by more than 30 national and international development organisations and corporate foundations from the financial and IT sectors. Its stated aim is to improve the lives of the poor. CGAP stands for Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, which is rarely used in full form. CGAP aims to achieve its goal by analysing and promoting commercial business models that enable the financial, IT and telecommunications sectors to reach as many people as possible with digital financial services, especially the poor.

References

  1. ↑ "Rajiv Gandhi Foundation's tryst with a social entrepreneur". 12 June 2018.
  2. ↑ Chakraborty, Somasroy (31 August 2011). "Q&A: Vijay Mahajan, Chairman, BASIX". Business Standard India– via Business Standard.
  3. ↑ "PRADAN - Professional Assistance for Development Action". 10 February 2021.
  4. ↑ "Illustrious Alumni - IIMA". Archived from the original on 11 August 2013. Retrieved 23 August 2013.
  5. ↑ Tibetan Refugee Community Integrated Development Plan-II, 1995-2000. Dharamsala, HP, India: Planning Council, Central Tibetan Administration of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. 1994.
  6. ↑ Fisher, Mahajan and Singha (1996). Forgotten Sector: Non-farm employment and enterprises in rural India. Rugby, UK: Practical Action. ISBN   978-1-85339-408-9.
  7. ↑ "Shri Mahila Sewa Sahakari Bank Ltd". www.sewabank.com.
  8. ↑ Mahajan and Ramola (March 1996). "Access and Sustainability: Financial Services for the Rural Poor and Women". Journal of International Development. 8 (2). doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-1328(199603)8:2<211::AID-JID378>3.0.CO;2-W – via JSTOR.
  9. ↑ "LAUNCH: Aviva and BASIX launch "Khushiyaan di Gaddi" in rural Punjab - City Air News". cityairnews.com. 14 January 2013.
  10. ↑ "BASIX alliance takes online insurance to rural folk" (PDF).
  11. ↑ "MFIN seeks RBI's intervention to enable MFIs to collect dues". Business Standard India. Press Trust of India. 11 April 2012 – via Business Standard.
  12. ↑ Administrator. "Basix India - BASIX Consulting". www.basixindia.com.
  13. 1 2 Reporter, B. S. (24 November 2012). "Basix launches retail model for risk products". Business Standard India– via Business Standard.
  14. ↑ "Basix plans to add 3 new micro-insurance scheme" (PDF).
  15. ↑ "Vijay Mahajan: Rebuilding a Stronger Microfinance Sector in India - Knowledge@Wharton".
  16. ↑ "Social Entrepreneurship - Members". p. 271.
  17. ↑ "New Concept". New Concept.
  18. ↑ "Sectoral Portal". livelihoods.rajasthan.gov.in.
  19. ↑ "Untitled Page". www.voiceofbharat.org. Archived from the original on 1 August 2013. Retrieved 3 February 2022.
  20. ↑ "Speakers | Impact forum 2013". Archived from the original on 30 July 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  21. ↑ "Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs 2012" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 September 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  22. ↑ "Vijay Mahajan - Ashoka - India". india.ashoka.org.
  23. ↑ "Vijay Mahajan Receives Accion's Edward W. Claugus Award for Financial Inclusion Leadership". Accion. 17 October 2019.
  24. ↑ "9781853394089: The Forgotten Sector: Non-farm Employment and Enterprises in Rural India - AbeBooks - Thomas Fisher; Vijay Mahajan: 1853394084". www.abebooks.com.
  25. ↑ Risan, Hoina M. "The Forgotten Sector : Non-farm employment and enterprises in rural India". www.dwu.ac.pg.
  26. ↑ Mahajan, Mr Vijay; Duggal, Bikram (27 April 2013). Microfinance - from the fire to the frying pan?. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN   978-1484136775.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.