Credit Where It’s Due

Ullon? What’s that? A village of 2,000, 66km off Kolkata on the state highway to the Sunderbans. Surrounded by 25,000 trees, patches of rich green fields, and squeaky clean, mud-brick roads. Schools, modern buildings, canal bridges, beautiful hutments. Cheery faces plying rickshaw vans, processing grain, sowing fields, cleaning roads, repairing potholes, widening roads, knitting clothes, fishing, selling vegetables, sipping tea, shopping at the haat…

Welcome to the Mecca of Microfinance. For Ullon is also the headquarters of a Rs 20 crore social enterprise called VSSU (Vivekananda Sevakendra-o-Sishu Uddyan). VSSU is a microfinance institution, but it prefers to call itself “a bank for community development”. Its area of operation: 220 villages of 24-Parganas South district. Its goal: empowering the villagers in and around Ullon by funding micro-enterprises.

The impact is visible right from the point you enter the village—the suddenly smooth 1km stretch before you reach the village has been built by the VSSU. From there onward, it’s a different world—the 37,401 members, 21,187 borrowers and 10, 453 active savers have turned this village and its adjoining areas into a proud hub of micro-enterprise. Says Kapil Mondol, an Ashoka Fellow and the moving spirit behind VSSU: “It is possible to develop communities without any external aid, by using only community resources—by using financial services to mobilise community resources and channelling them into community development.”