Samit
Ghosh founded Ujjivan in 2005 and currently serves
as the Managing Director of the organization.
His motivations for starting Ujjivan were twofold
– both professional and personal.
Samit was a career banker spanning 30 years and
worked both in South Asia & Middle East. He
started his career with Citibank in 1975. Between
1985-90 he was part of their pioneering management
team to launch consumer banking to the middle
class in India and the Arabian Gulf in 1990-93.
He led the launch of Retail Banking in South Asia
& Middle East for Standard Chartered Bank
during 1993-96. In 1996 as Executive Director
of HDFC Bank, he initiated their Retail Banking
business. His last banking assignment was as Chief
Executive of Bank Muscat in India from 1998 to
2003.
In India, microfinance had been reaching the
rural poor, but the urban poor population was
still an undiscovered market segment. After
immense success in both consumer and retail
banking, Samit wanted to challenge himself to
provide financial services to a new frontier,
the 600 million un-served poor in India. Among
them, he saw the 100+ million urban and semi-urban
poor totally neglected by the Government and
NGO poverty alleviation programs and also the
microfinance institutions. This was an opportunity
to develop and pioneer urban microfinance in
India.
Samit started his childhood in what was then
Bihar with his parents and elder brother. His
father, a doctor, served in the Indian Army
during World War II, after which he chose to
join the Indian Medical Service and work for
the Government to set up hospitals in various
parts of the coal and mica mining districts
of Bihar now in Jharkhand. When Samit was ten
years old, his father passed away leaving the
family without a home, little financial security
and compelling them to move to the shelter of
the joint family house in Kolkata. His adolescent
growing years motivated him to ensure that his
family was never again put in a position of
financial insecurity. He graduated from St.Xavier’s
School in Science, did his undergraduate in
Economics in Jadavpur University and finally
completed his education with a Masters in Business
Administration from Wharton at University of
Pennsylvania. His father’s dedication
to providing much needed medical care for the
poor miners, true to his Hippocratic Oath, left
a lasting impression on him. So did the Jesuits
who taught him at school and his uncles who
led the lives of communist revolutionaries.
His mother was a dedicated teacher in Kolkata
for over 40 years. Reflecting on his life as
a banker for 30 years, Samit acknowledged his
professional & material successes, but realized
that it would be empty without making a significant
impact on the society where it was most required.
Motivated by both professional and reasons of
the heart, Samit founded Ujjivan in 2005. The
transformation from a career banker to an entrepreneur
would not have been easy without the steadfast
support of his wife, Elaine, and hand holding
by his close friend from Wharton, Sunil Patel.
Samit acknowledges with gratitude his friends
and colleagues both in India and overseas who
believed in his vision and provided the initial
capital.
In a few short years, Ujjivan has become one
of the fastest growing MFI’s, now present
across India and serving hundreds of thousands
of poor working women in India. Asked about
how he feels of Ujjivan’s success to date,
Samit replied, “Drawing up plans and crunching
numbers on paper is one thing, but seeing hundreds
of staff in the fast growing organization and
hundreds of thousands of poor customers benefiting
from Ujjivan across India is a perpetual high.
Even more gratifying is how people across different
generations and cultures (school & university
students, professionals from other areas and
the older generation) are interested in the
same cause – reaffirms the faith that
we are building an organization for the future.”
Post collapse of socialism and the recent demise
of capitalism as we knew it, the challenge is
to build Ujjivan as new type of enterprise incorporating
the good elements of both the systems.
Just like Samit’s work in Citibank in
developing consumer banking to serve 200 million
middle class in India in 1985, he believes that
Ujjivan is one of the pioneers to develop an
industry to serve the 600 million poor. He sees
his responsibility not just in founding Ujjivan
but starting an industry which, over the next
two decades and well after he is gone, will
provide financial services to the entire poor
population in India and will be one of the keys
in the battle for poverty alleviation.
