Delhi brims with business opportunities,” said Vijay wistfully the other day, “I always managed to make an extra buck when I lived there…” Given that he was a Sanjhi maker (a traditional paper cutwork craftsman) by birth and profession, I wondered what he was talking about. “Looking back, I realise that most of the time I’d actually end up earning more on the side than I did making Sanjhis!” said he. I settled down to listen to his story.
“When I first moved to Delhi, I found a place to stay near the Okhla vegetable wholesale market,” said Vijay. Early every morning, he’d see vegetable sellers queuing up outside his house to buy their day’s stock. “Since I hadn’t forsaken my village ways for the unfriendly ways of the city, I began exchanging a few words with them every day,” narrated Vijay. He learnt that vegetable sellers needed at least Rs 1,000 every morning to buy a reasonable selection of fresh vegetables to sell. “By evening, they invariably made a profit of at least Rs 500 on their investment,” said he. But there were many days when his new friends did not have the Rs 1,000 to invest in the morning.
“The first time I lent money to a vegetable seller, he was in dire need,” said Vijay. By evening, he gratefully returned Rs 1,100 to Vijay. “There was tremendous scope in this, I realised,” said Vijay. So he returned to his home in Mathura and borrowed Rs 20,000 from his father. “I let it be known that I could lend money, but only to known people, or those who’d been vouched for. Within a month, he was lending out his basic sum of Rs 20,000 to 18 to 20 vegetable sellers every morning, and getting it back every evening with a neat little profit.
“Each vegetable seller paid me whatever interest he could, and sometimes if he’d not done good business and returned my money without any interest, that was fine too,” said he. Few of his fast-growing circle of ‘friends’ ever reneged on a loan, Vijay said proudly. “Since they knew that they’d to return to Okhla mandi day after day, they always returned my money,” said he, “also there was a lot of peer pressure to pay me back, since all the vegetable sellers knew who’d borrowed how much from me.”
So Vijay found himself richer by about Rs 4,000-5,000 a month, just by making his seed capital work for him — something no bank would have been able to do. “The beauty of this enterprise was that everyone was gaining from it — I was getting interest, my vegetable-seller friends were getting the capital to do business … in fact, some managed to grow their businesses to the extent that they graduated from carts to proper stands in markets!” he reminisced. They’d all realised a basic concept in business — it takes money to grow money. So an ever-growing crowd of people aspired to be in the charmed circle of Vijay’s ‘friends’.
It ended when Vijay’s father summoned him back to Mathura after a few years. “I bowed my head to his wishes, but even now, sometimes, I think of those heady days in Delhi …” said he coming to the end of his reminiscences. Did he know, I asked, that someone had won a Nobel Prize for doing pretty much the same thing as he’d done, but on a larger scale? They call it micro credit, I said. He was amazed: “They say its social service? To me it was just a good way to use my father’s money to make money!”
