Smita

Smita Ram is a co-founder of Rang De, a Bengaluru-based non-profit lending platform that connects individual lenders in India with borrowers on low incomes.

She and Ramakrishna NK were working in the United Kingdom when Muhammad Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his microcredit work. They were persuaded of the case for small loans but troubled by how Indian microfinance institutions were making them, including reports from 2004 of borrowers unable to service debt taking their own lives. Working from the model of the online lender Kiva, they returned to India and launched Rang De on 26 January 2008 with support from the ICICI Foundation, structuring it as a not-for-profit trust rather than splitting it into charitable and commercial arms as investors urged.

The platform allows anyone to lend from as little as Rs 100, screens borrowers through partner organisations on the ground, and charges rates far below those then usual in Indian microfinance. Between 2008 and 2017 it channelled more than Rs 80 crore to around 65,000 families through some 15,000 social investors, with over nine in ten borrowers women, and it works with field partners across the country. When the Reserve Bank of India brought peer-to-peer lending under regulation in 2017 the organisation registered as an NBFC-P2P to continue.

The founders' later conclusion was that the cost of credit was only part of the problem and that borrowers also lacked the information to make decisions about it. That led to Swabhimaan, a financial literacy programme launched at Yeswanthpur in Kolar district on 8 March 2017, which uses self-service kiosks in villages and links credit to bank accounts opened under the Jan Dhan scheme, and to Habba, a marketplace for artisans. Ram was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2012.[2][3][4]