Banking for the poor - Pakistan Dawn

By Dr Ishrat Husain In 1974 a young Economics professor of Chittagong University had just returned from the US after his doctorate in an exoteric topic when the famine struck Bangladesh. He approached the people of a village near the University as to how he could help them and discovered that their biggest problem was that they were so heavily indebted to the moneylenders that they had almost lost their freedom of individual action. The moneylenders were charging exorbitant rates of interest that ...