A Country of Saints & Loan Sharks – Incredible India

From www.WorldWomanWarrior.com

TRUE WARRIORS

A Country of Saints & Loan Sharks – Incredible India

By Shaku Atre, shaku@atre.comwww.atre.com

Copyright Oct 01, 2016 by Shaku Atre

Shaku Atre is a Mathematician with a Master’s Degree in Statistics from Pune University, India and research in Heidelberg University, Germany on scholarship with a thesis in Astronomy. She is a Computer Scientist. She worked for IBM Germany and IBM World Trade in the New York City, US. She is an entrepreneur. She developed a computer company www.atre.com which was acquired by Coopers & Lybrand after being acquired by Computer Assistance. She is an international speaker who has travelled to 40+ countries as a keynote speaker on computer issues. Her specialty is Data Bases. She designed and developed the FBI database.

Currently she is developing mobile apps together with her software engineers.

She is on a mission to help women worldwide to become financially independent. Please visit www.WorldWomanWarrior.com .

She lives with her husband in their principal home in Manhattan, New York, US. She has a home in Pune, India and one in Santa Cruz, California.

Our cook and cleaning lady in Pune, IndiaSunitalooked very sad. So I asked her what the matter was. I knew that her son died at the age of 28, a year ago, because of some illness with his liver. She and her husband took him to the hospital. Most of these poor people have no medical insurance. As a result her husband took a big loan to pay for the hospital bills. And he is paying it off from his monthly salary because he has a Government job of sweeping the roads in the city of Pune.

Someone advised Sunita to buy something for her son so that he would recover. When your loved one is ill you are like a drowning person. You try to hold onto anything that is floating – just to survive. She needed to buy whatever medicine that was recommended and for buying it she needed money. Where to get Rs.300, 000.00 (Rupees Three hundred thousand).All one has to do is ask in your neighborhood the so called “Hutment”. Someone gave her the mobile phone number of a person who would facilitate the loan.

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The son was in the hospital for months – close to a year. In most of the hospitals the relatives of a patient have to pay upfront at the time of getting admission into the hospital. And when that money runs out the hospital tells the responsible relatives that “You have to pay us this and this much for the next procedure – if you can’t afford it please move the patient to a free hospital which is literally –Hell- “I have visited the free hospital – I wanted to see its condition. Unbelievably filthy – I can’t describe the conditions in words – one would die there – even though you may not have died if you would not have gone to that hospital”. That means the loved ones have to take loans from the loan sharks.

Sunita took a loan of Rs. 300,000.00. (Let us not convert Rupees into Dollars. People in India make Rupees – not Dollars). Unfortunately her son died in the hospital. And since the death of her son she has been paying 8% interest rate. I know how much we pay her per month. So I thought with what she makes she is fine to pay off the loan with 8% interest rate. Then I asked Asif, our manager in Pune, who takes care of everything for us. He isa very upright individual. I wanted to know the truth. So I asked Asif in front of Sunita why she is so worried. I said the interest rate is 8% – right? But Asif realized what I was thinking.

He said 8% is not a yearly interest rate – it is a monthly interest rate! That means she has to pay Rs. 24,000.00 (Rupees Twenty Four Thousand) per month only on interest – all cash. That means in a year’s time the person who gave her loan has collected almost all of his principal in cash – not necessary to declare anything and will continue collecting interest further for years with principal still intact!

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I sat down with her and Asif and we made a plan. I am giving her full outstanding loaned amount, which is the complete principal, because she had paid only interest which is about the same amount for a year, as loan’s principal WITHOUT interest. Hopefully Sunita pays us our principal without interest back in the amount of her salary per month. Hopefully she knows that she is not supposed to take any loan. That is fine till someone from her family has to go to the hospital!

Asif went with Sunita and met the loan shark. These loan sharks meet the person who has taken the loan only on a street corner. They never give out their names or their addresses. They keep on changing the mobile Tel number very frequently. Asif asked the shark whether he feels bad to take this much interest. He said “I get the money to loan out from a rich man, called a Sawkar. The Sawkar charges him 5% monthly interest. He has a partner and the two share 1.5% interest per month each.” Asif asked him what the highest interest rate you havecharged” – without even blinking an eye he said 25% per month.

After Asif and Sunita returned to the loan shark Rs 300,000.00 the loan shark will find his next victim within a few minutes. One misery will be transported to another household of a poor person.

This was very upsetting to me. What I did is only a drop in the bucket! There are so many people who are in the same situation like Sunita- especially women!

I have started putting a decent Health Insurance person together with people like Sunita so that they won’t be bankrupt when a loved one becomes ill and has to be taken to a hospital.

Please see some statistics about women like Sunita who become victims of the Loan Sharks.

Let us consider the story of Sunita, a cleaning lady in India. Is Sunita rich or poor? It depends on where she fits in the data description of the country’s population of 1.252 Billion. Let us consider only one state of India: Maharashtra with a population of 114.2 Million (2012) – about 10% of entire India’s population.

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Sunita, our cleaning lady in India, is poor, but she is making 8,000(Eight thousand) Rupees a month by working for us. Sunita has a family and a home. She is content with her lot.

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How common is her predicament? How many women like Sunita take loans from the loan sharks in the State of Maharashtra which has a population of 114.2 million people?

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What happens to these 792,000 women?

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