SPEECH
BY SHRI K.R. NARAYANAN, THE PRESIDENT OF INDIA, WHILE PRESENTING THE INDIRA
GANDHI PRIZE FOR PEACE, DISARMAMENT AND DEVELOPMENT -1998 TO DR. MUHAMMED
YUNUS
NEW DELHI, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1999
It gives me great pleasure to have presented the 1998 Indira Gandhi Prize
for Peace, Disarmament and Development to Prof. Muhammed Yunus, the founder
of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. By discovering and applying in practice
micro-credit as a simple but potent instrument for the economic empowerment
of the poor and the poorest of the poor, particularly women, in Bangladesh,
Prof. Yunus has made an invaluable contribution to the methodology of
abolishing poverty in the developing world. It is entirely appropriate
that the Indira Gandhi Prize for this year should go to Prof. Muhammed
Yunus. I have the honour to congratulate him and our friendly neighbour
Bangladesh which has produced him.
Indira
Gandhi in her struggle for peace and development had given India in the
1960's the challenging slogan 'Garibi Hatao'. "We want peace"
she declared, "to fight another war - the war against poverty and
hunger". On August 24, 1969 addressing the Bankers' Club in New Delhi
she said that the banker has "an opportunity and a challenge to cast
himself in dynamic and innovating role. Rural banking in particular, will
require new techniques and methods of work. The attitude of conventional
and conservative banking will not be enough if banks are to foster and
enlarge the oncoming agricultural revolution and to benefit from substantial
incomes which it is generating in the rural areas. .... On the side of
lending also, new ideas will be essential. You will have to innovate in
respect of security requirements. Clearly, the traditional insistence
on collateral security or documents of land ownership will be self-defeating.
Such methods would rule out millions of small farmers and tenants".
She added that banking operations should be informed by a larger social
purpose.
It
was guided by a vision of a "larger social purpose" combined
with practical efficacy and direct approach to the needy poor that Prof.
Muhammed Yunus launched an action research programme near the University
of Chittagang to develop a credit system to provide banking services targeted
to the rural poor with $ 27 of his own as seed money which he put into
it. This is the Grameen Bank which has become the largest rural institution
in Bangladesh and one of the largest in the world. It has more than 2.5
million borrowers, 94% of whom are women. Grameen Bank to-day covers more
than half of the total villages of Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank has inspired
people and institutions in 58 countries of the world in South Asia, South
East Asia, Asia Pacific, Central Asia and Africa. It has demonstrated
that given the support of financial capital the poor are capable of bringing
about a change in their socio-economic conditions and their lives.
Prof.
Yunus has established credit as a fundamental human justify which would
bring out the poor people's latent qualities of entrepreneurship, self-reliance
and self-esteem as human beings. By providing tiny sums of credit to the
poorest of the poor in Bangladesh, to people without any collateral or
land or education or even shelter, 94% of whom women, the Grameen Bank
has uplifted from deprivation and poverty millions of men and women. Side
by side with access to credit, Yunus's mission includes making modern
information and communication technology available to the poor free of
cost. Thus it unleashes the potential for creativity and productivity
in each individual, enabling him or her to move into the modern globalised
world.
I
am happy to acknowledge that Prof. Yunus's Grameen Bank experiment has
given impetus to micro-credit programmes in India in a big way. As I said
earlier Indira Gandhi spelt out the idea of micro-credit as early as in
1969. Even much earlier the idea was inherent in Mahatma Gandhi's vision
of gram panchayats for the attainment of democratic decentralisation and
the abolition of poverty in India. It is interesting that Gandhiji had
visualized even the micro-credit system and rural banking. He observed
as early as 1930's "Savings Bank to-day in India, though a useful
institution, do not serve the poorest.
As for the insurance companies
they are of no use to the poor. The function of savings bank ought to
enable the poorest to husband their hard earned savings and subserve the
interest of the country generally." Prof. Muhammed Yunus has gone
further in a practical sense and brought micro-credit to the doorstep
of the poorest of the poor and endowed them with the power of becoming
self-reliant human beings capable of contributing to the good of the whole
society. Gandhiji would have hailed Prof. Muhammed Yunus as a liberator
of the poor and the poorest of the poor, the women of our sub-continent.
May I congratulate him again on his noble contribution to the struggle
against poverty and deprivation, and as the recipient of the Indira Gandhi
Prize.
Thank you
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