Model micro-financing

We are in the era of the country’s youth making a bold entry into the world of business. They have given a fancied name to their initiative. People who read reports in the land’s dailies, even irregularly, cannot hide their wonder listening from the avid readers about the goings on virtually sans any flare or noise. The surprise element is that the players of the unprecedented action are, in a certain sense, the boys from our own backyards, armed with degrees in engineering, management, commerce and even humanities. For the starters, the action which is picking up has come to be known as Start-Ups, which has erupted in every sense of the term. The boys, sounding like seasoned successful business fraternity, seem to abhor publicity and prefer to respond to questions about their business in mono-syllables. Mysuru too is playing host to Start-Ups of a different class, the other feature of action in the city being the players are also providers of tasty dishes at prices hard to believe these days. We are talking of city’s roadside eateries and also small-time darshanis.

The stories of men who have been bestowed adulation in glorious terms for building their respective business empires barely reveal the hard times of their journey to success. Money has played its viscious role in making or marring their success story, based on which all theories of managing capital have been written. But, theory and practice of dealing with cash in business are as different as chalk and cheese.

Karnataka’s distinguished citizen of a distant past, answering to the name of Sarvajna (one who knows all that needs to be known) is credited with the famous verse with the message that taking a loan is like savouring a delicious dish but it is a different story when confronting the creditor. His philosophical portrayal of getting indebted has just been dashed, given the massive farm loan waiver leaving the lending banks in dire straits. People other than the farming fraternity must be regretting that they didn’t get into agriculture. The case of Mysuru’s small-time traders, who are peddling articles of daily need door-to-door, particularly fruits and vegetables, doesn’t need to be elaborated, except their plight of being in the clutches of money-lenders.

The State Government has reportedly mooted a new scheme of giving a day loan for street vendors who are taking small amounts of working capital from private money- lenders to earn livelihood on a daily basis. If the scheme doesn’t suffer at the hands of the staff in charge, it shall go down as a model in micro-financing.