Instead what the Bill says is that MFIs cannot go to the customer's premises to ask for recovery and that all transactions will be done in the Panchayat office. With great difficulty, MFIs brought services to the door of people. It is such a relief for the customers not to be spending time out going to banks or Panchayat offices, which could be 10 km away in some cases. A facility which has brought some relief to people is being shut. Moreover, you are practically telling the MFI where it should do business and how it should do it.
Social responsibilities were inbuilt when the MFIs were first conceived. If MFIs go for profit with loose regulations, how are they different from moneylenders?
Even among moneylenders there are very good people who take care of the customer's circumstance, and there are really bad ones. A large number of the MFIs are good and there are some who are coercive because of the kind of prices and processes they have adopted. But Moneylenders never got this organised. They did not have such a large footprint. An MFI brought in organisation, it mobilized the equity, it brought in commercial funding. It invested in systems. It appointed a large number of people. But some of them exacted a much higher price than they should have. They wanted to break even very fast and greed did take over in some cases.
Are the for-profit MFIs the only ones harassing people for recoveries?
Some not-for-profit outfits have also adopted the same kind of recovery methods. That may be because you have to show that you are very efficient in your recovery methods and that your portfolio is of a very high quality if you want to get commercial funding from a bank.
In fact, among for-profits there are many who have sensible recovery practices. Some have fortnightly recovery, some have monthly recovery. So we have differing practices. We just describe a few dominant ones and assume every for-profit MFI operates like that.
How can you introduce regulations to ensure social upliftment in a sector that is moving towards for-profit models?
I am not really concerned whether someone wants to make a profit or not The bottom-line for me is customer protection. The first area is fair practices. Are you telling your customers how the loan is structured ? Are you being transparent about your performance? There should also be a lender's liability attached to what you do. Suppose you lend excessively to a customer without assessing their ability to service the loan, you have to take the hit.
Then there's the question of limiting returns. You can say that an MFI cannot have a return on assets more than X, a return on equity of more than Y. Then suppose there is a privately promoted MFI, there should be a regulation to ensure the MFI cannot access equity markets till a certain amount of time. MFIs went to markets perhaps because of the need to grow too big too fast. The government thought they were making profit off the poor, and that's an indirect reason why they decided to clamp down on MFIs. If you say an MFI won't go to capital market, then it will keep political compulsions under rein.
