The Women the Banks Turned Away | Raman Wadhwa | TEDxIMTGhaziabad

About this video

A woman named Nirmala Devi once sat outside a mud house in Chitrakoot and cried because she didn't have 150 rupees for her child's school fees. A bank manager told her, "We don't open accounts for people like you." Today, she chairs a dairy company with an annual turnover of 625 crore rupees. Raman Wadhwa has watched this happen across India, at a scale most people don't track, and this talk makes the case that rural women are not the country's welfare problem. They are its most capable builders. Raman Wadhwa is Director at DAY-NRLM, the Ministry of Rural Development's National Rural Livelihoods Mission, one of the largest poverty reduction programs in the world. An IMT Ghaziabad alumnus from the Batch of 1998, he has spent more than two decades helping shift India's approach to rural poverty from handouts to enterprise. His work spans policy design, women-led producer companies, and institutional systems that have put over 12 lakh crore rupees in bank linkages into communities the formal economy had written off. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx