Ram

Ram is a co-founder, with Smita Ram, of Rang De, the Bengaluru organisation that introduced peer-to-peer social lending to India as a way of getting affordable credit to people whom banks will not serve.

The idea took shape while the two were in Oxford, where the contrast between conditions in the developed world and in India led them to conclude that poverty underlay most of the social problems they cared about, and that economic empowerment was the way to address it at the root. They wanted a mechanism through which ordinary Indians could put money directly into the livelihoods of other Indians rather than donate to intermediaries.

Rang De launched in 2008 as a non-profit platform on which individuals could lend small sums, from a few hundred rupees upwards, to farmers, artisans and small entrepreneurs at interest rates far below those charged by moneylenders or conventional microfinance. Borrowers are identified and mentored by community organisations and social enterprises that Rang De calls impact partners, which also support repayment. In 2017 the founders launched Swabhimaan, which offers credit designed specifically for rural women and uses digital public infrastructure to keep the cost of small loans low. In 2019 the organisation converted from a non-profit into an entity regulated by the Reserve Bank of India as a peer-to-peer lending platform, a change that allowed it to scale while keeping the social-investment model. The founders have since taken the platform into financing for climate-resilient livelihoods, including electric vehicles for rickshaw pullers and support for farmers in Assam and Tamil Nadu.[2][3]