The unexciting story of Ujjivan
How does one write a story of an organisation? How do we get that one thing that an organisation stands for? Is it the promoter and (in this case) his professional life? Is it the trials and tribulations of setting up an organisation and its moral, ethical and growth dilemmas? These are difficult questions, and the structuring of a book is largely left to the preferred style of an author. Ela Bhatt wrote an evocative autobiography that focused on her professional life, which was also a biography of the SEWA movement. Muhammad Yunus wrote one on his life and Grameen Bank. Outsiders have written about organisations — Morgen Witzel wrote a story, Tata: The Evolution Of A Corporate Brand, which was a biography in the nature of a hagiography. And of course, there have been early biographies of organisations, much before their legacy could be established: An Idea Whose Time Has Come by Pramath Sinha is one of them.
Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey wrote a book, Cold Steel, on Laksmi Mittal’s empire which reads like a thriller. Tamal Bandyopadhyay has a unique whodunit style of writing organisational stories — with all the ups downs and drama when he writes about Sahara, HDFC Bank or Bandhan. Given such a rich background of organisational stories, the expectation of one more is already set. These expectations are heightened when one knows a bit about the organisation and is a part of the conversation that helps fill in some content in the book, and when the wait has been long from the conception stage to print.
Disclaimer 1: I had a long chat with Subir Roy about the organisation and have been extensively quoted in at least one chapter. Disclaimer 2: I have been tracking both the promoter, Samit Ghosh, and the organisation, Ujjivan, from its inception.
It is against this background that I am looking at the book on Ujjivan. There is a sense of disappointment with the product. Possibly, there isn’t much of a story to be told; possibly, it is a bit too early and there may be much more unfolding. Unlike the Bandhan story, which covered Chandra Shekhar Ghosh’s personal struggles, this story appears insipid. Surely, there were many interesting episodes in Ujjivan’s evolution from a small microfinance institution to a small finance bank? Samit Ghosh played a significant role not only in Ujjivan but as the Chair of Microfinance Institutions Network and as a statesman for the sector. This is a sector that went through some high drama, and Ujjivan, while it ducked the Andhra Pradesh tsunami, was very much a part of the negotiations. The book does not even do justice to the smaller sub-title “Transforming with Technology” because we do not see the unique technological edge that Ujjivan offered in this sector.
The way the book is structured is a little problematic. While the book sets out to tell the story of Ujjivan, and therefore should have had a viewpoint of Ujjivan looking at the outside world, the framing is in the opposite direction. The book is structured like an event book on the evolution of the microfinance world in the context of Ujjivan. Thus, it neither does a great job of painting the macro picture of the ecosystem on how the inclusive finance space was evolving nor does it paint a micro picture of the trials and tribulations of the organisation. Each issue the organisation faces is immediately elevated to the macro picture. In fact, the two chapters on situating microfinance and the chapter titled “Experts Remember” appear quite redundant to the Ujjivan story. There is an entire chapter on the crisis in Andhra but it tangentially affected Ujjivan because the institution had no operations there. The Introduction of 46 pages has large portions of the ensuing chapters reproduced verbatim. There are many such elements the one could nitpick but the basic drift is that the narrative could have been much more exciting.
The book captures the essence of Ujjivan as a textbook case of a successful start-up in the inclusive finance space. Unlike its peers in the microfinance world — organisations such as Share, SKS or Spandana Sphoorthy — it was set up as a for-profit company and had an appropriate organisational form to start with. Mr Ghosh did his homework well to understand how this business was run and even hired consultants from Grameen Bank during the start-up phase. There was no great rhetoric of the promise of eradicating poverty. The promise was modest and the delivery was as good as the promise. There were appropriate design changes to suit the local cultural nuances. The scaling up was at the right pace. There was good governance. At an appropriate stage, there was an opportunity to move towards banking. Ujjivan grabbed the opportunity and lived happily ever after.
If one were to look at just the phase between being granted an in-principle licence and the tensions of managing the transition within the stipulated 18-month period, there is more than enough drama to write a book. Unfortunately, Mr Roy seems to have taken a view from a certain distance. That is the problem with the book. As a biography, it needed to be more intimate. It isn’t.