Everything in India takes a few extra steps. After a few days at my service apartment, I finally was informed that I had no hot water because there was a boiler that also needed to be turned on. While I'm used to generally just finding a hotel within my price range, here finding a place to stay involved several days of phone calls (thank God for my friend and his dad who took care of that for me) and negotiations to agree on the rate for a two month stay. And that was all before we decided that air conditioning really was necessary for an Alaskan to live in Bangalore. Which brings us to the first lesson of India: "Solpa adjust maadi." In Kannada, the language predominately spoken in Karnataka, this roughly translates to "Please adjust a little, sir."
To some degree, this phrase highlights the difference between the Indian mentality and our Western expectations. My research partner, Yavor Danailov, and Bangalore native friend and guide, Adithya Manohar, got into a long debate (not surprising since we are all members of the debate team) over whether it was better to have a society structure by rules and regulations, or a society that was willing to "adjust a little." There is a Sanskrit saying that goes "Na shreyo niyamam vina" or "No progress without rules and regulations.” To someone from a Western culture, this seems self evident. Rules and regulations promote a system of equality, justice, and order. But there is also some chaotic beauty in a society that can recognize that life does not always fit into these boundaries and requires adjustment.
One of the first things to adjust once we got here (after a weekend of drinking coconuts, eating shark, watching the monsoon rains, and inadvertently fondling cockroaches) was our project. Sanghamithra, it turns out, is quite unique as microfinance institutions (MFIs) go. As we knew going in, it is a non-profit organization. But it is also entirely financially self-sufficient and despite not having profit motivation has actually made surpluses consistently for several years. Even more interestingly, SRFS does not lend to individuals. It exclusively lends to Self Help Groups, a group of 15-20 individuals who have been saving and lending internally for around 6 months to a year. The SHG can approach SRFS for a loan, and if it receives it, it is free to distribute the loan money as it sees fit among its members. This creates an entirely new dynamic in the project, as we were initially planning to study the impact of the MFI’s financial structure on the individual clients. This to some degree creates a middle man. On the other hand, it also opens a world of opportunities. After two days of reading background materials on SRFS, looking and its financials, and reading impact studies carried out by other researchers, Yavor and I adjusted the project to fit the new structure. We will be visiting SHGs (hopefully one per day, even though the projects are rural which makes travel a problem). In addition to the client interviews we came prepared to do, we will be interviewing the leaders of the SHG with a different set of questions regarding the nature of the SHG itself. In this way, we will have three levels of study: the impact of firm decisions (particularly regarding financial matters) on the SHG, the relationship of the SHG both with SRFS and its members, and the ultimate impact on the members’ livelihood.
Hopefully today we will have a more concrete plan as to what SHGs we will visit and how we are going to get there, but for now this is a beautiful morning in Bangalore and it’s time to get to work.
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