Banking on Hope

Chandra Shekhar Ghosh offers millions of poverty-stricken Indians the means to reclaim their futures

- Sanghamitra Chakraborty

CHANDRA SHEKHAR GHOSH, 59, was first confronted with dehumanizing hunger as a young NGO worker. He was often dispatched to the remote districts of Rangpur in Bangladesh, 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 inclusion 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 makeshift oven in front of her shack. “Her infant 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 responded: “For three days, my child has been crying for some fish and rice, and I have been promising it to her. I only have rice at home, and don’t know how to make her eat it without the fish. Can you tell me how?”