Yunus quotes some incredible statistics "...the top 1 per centreceive as much income as the bottom 57 per cent numbering over three billion individuals". (p.208) "...Today the Grameen Bank gives loans to nearly 7.0 million poor people, 97 per cent of whom are women in 73,000 villages in Bangladesh....". "Since it opened the bank has given out loans totalling about US$ 6.0 billion. The repayment rate is 99 per cent". (p.240) "In Bangladesh 80 per cent of the poor families have already been reached with micro-credit. We are hoping that by 2010, 100 per cent of the families will be reached".
Has the banker for the poor created a Bangladesh without poverty?Yunus started his "mission" in 1974 in Jobra, a small village, near the Chittagong University campus. Todajy there are Grameen-type programmes in almost every country in the world. I found Yunus very focussed in his long career from 1974 to 2009 fostering micro-credit first in Bangladesh and then all over the world": First, Grameen loans primarily go to women. Second, women besides planning and implementing their own poverty-alleviation programmes are interested in the welfare of their children and put them into school and this led to another programme. Grameen encouraged them and before long all the children were going to school (p.241). "Many of these children topped their class.. . so Grameen introduced scholarships . . . Grameen now gives 30,000 scholarships every year. Many of the children went on to higher education to become doctors, engineers, college teachers and other professionals. We introduced student loans ... now some have Ph.Ds. There are 13,000 students on loans. Over 7,000 are added annually. We are creating a completely new generation ... We want to make a break in the historical continuation of poverty". Unlike other Peace Prizes, this Nobel Prize went to the Grameen Bank which
This is a set of thirteen very scholarly and critical essays about mining in India focused on three states -Chhattisgarh (4), Orissa ( 5 ) and Jharkhand(3). The book deals with displacement due to mining, mainly bauxite, iron ore, uranium and coal, in primarily Schedule V tribal areas causing displacement without Fully Informed Prior Consent (FIPC), specifically required by UN bodies when displacing Zndigenous or Tribal people. Laws in different countries vary: in the US, gold, uranium or diamonds found under a man's land belongs to him. In India due to British colonial laws, it belonged to the 'crown' (like the Kohinoor diamond). Rakesh Kalshian in his Preface uses the analogy of the Hollywood film Blood Diamond about poor ordinary people slaving in mines for diamonds used to fund a civil war in Sierra Leone. "Echoes of the Blood Diamond are now reverbating in the hollows of India's mineral-rich regions. Chasing its dreams of becoming an economic superstar, India has opened its rich mineral pits for exploitation by private capital. Auspiciously, . . .for the ambitions of the mineral-rich states.. . being left behind in the race for economic prosperity, they have rolled out the red carpet for private investors, domestic as well as foreign, in the hope of creating a modern, prosperous edifice on the foundations of their mineral endowments"(p 5).
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