Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who was really helpful by Bangladeshi pupil leaders as the pinnacle of the interim authorities in Bangladesh, waves at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport in Roissy-en-France, France August 7, 2024.
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Filling the management vacuum in Bangladesh, albeit quickly, Nobel Laureate and economist Muhammad Yunus has taken oath as head of the interim authorities. The 84-year-old microfinance pioneer will head the federal government till recent polls are held. The parliament has already been dissolved by the nation’s president Mohammed Shahabuddin.
“If action is needed in Bangladesh, for my country and for the courage of my people, then I will take it,” Mr.Yunus stated on Tuesday, a day after Ms. Hasina resigned and left the nation. He was known as on by pupil coordinators of the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement to move the interim authorities.
Banker to the poor
“In Dr. Yunus, we trust,” wrote Asif Mahmud, a key chief of the Students Against Discrimination (SAD) group, in a Facebook submit, echoing the widespread acceptability Mr. Yunus has in Bangladesh’s fractious polity.
Born on June 28, 1940, in Chittagong, East Bengal (now Bangladesh), Muhammad Yunus, the third of 9 kids, accomplished his main training at Lamabazar Primary School after which studied on the Chittagong Collegiate School. After finishing each a B.A. and an M.A. in Economics from Dhaka University, he began his instructing profession as a lecturer in the identical college in 1961. Obtaining a PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University, Dr. Yunus started his tenure as an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, U.S., in 1969.
As conflict ravaged his homeland, because it struggled for liberation from Pakistan, Dr. Yunus lobbied the U.S. Congress to cease army support to Pakistan. He additionally helped increase assist for the Liberation motion by working a Bangladesh Information Center in Washington D.C, and a Citizen’s Committee in Nashville, Tenessee, together with publishing the Bangladesh Newsletter.
With the beginning of Bangladesh, he returned house, becoming a member of the Economics Department of the University of Chittagong in 1972. As the newly-separated Bangladesh suffered a famine in 1974, he forayed into rural economics, introducing the Nabajug Tebhaga Khamar to review financial facets of poverty, and urged his college students to help to farmers in fields. In his visits to farming households in Chittagong’s Jobra area, he realised the need and effectiveness of small loans to girls bamboo furnishings makers, liberating them from claws of mortgage sharks. Initiating the primary ‘small loan’, Dr. Yunus lent $27 to 42 households in Jobra to fabricate their objects on the market.
FILE- Muhammad Yunus, an economist from Bangladesh who based the Grameen Bank and gained a Nobel Peace Prize, is seen on the finish of a press convention in Paris Monday Feb. 18, 2008.
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AP
This concept gave rise to microfinance in 1976, the place Dr. Yunus provided himself because the guarantor and secured a credit score line from Janata Bank to lend small loans to Jobra residents. In 1983, the Grameen Bank was established, specialising in small loans and enjoying a pivotal function in eradicating poverty by way of micro-credit requiring no collateral. Over 100 nations, together with India, have replicated this mannequin. As of 2024, Grameen Bank has 2,568 branches throughout 81,678 villages with 10.61 million debtors.
Dr. Yunus’ pioneering work in microfinance gained him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for lending a social conscience to capitalism and “their efforts to create economic and social development from below” in Bangladesh. However, it additionally attracted authorized hassle in Bangladesh.
Brief political foray
Ahead of the 2006 polls, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League (AL) did not agree on a candidate to move the caretaker authorities, resulting in the imposition of a state of emergency in Bangladesh. With each Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina incarcerated by the military-backed authorities on extortion prices, Mr. Yunus introduced that he would contest within the subsequent polls by forming the Nagorik Shakti social gathering in February 2007. However, he dropped the plans inside months as a consequence of lack of public assist.
Clash with Hasina authorities
On coming to energy in 2009, Ms. Hasina’s authorities started scrutinising Mr. Yunus and Grameen Bank. In 2011, he was eliminated as managing director of the microlending financial institution, as he had handed the retirement age of 60. While he challenged his ouster, he misplaced the courtroom battle accusing Ms. Hasina of targetting him. On a number of events, Ms. Hasina has accused Mr. Yunus for influencing the World Bank, which cancelled a $1.2 billion credit score for the Padma Multipurpose Bridge Project in 2012 – a cost which he has refuted. Over 150 circumstances have been filed in opposition to Mr. Yunus by the Hasina authorities as of 2023.
The micro-financing mannequin itself got here beneath the scanner after Mr. Yunus admitted that some organisations could have abused the system for revenue. The lack of collateral in such loans have attracted excessive rates of interest by some banks, resulting in debtors falling into extra debt. In 2019, an arrest warrant was issued in opposition to Mr. Yunus for 3 alleged breaches beneath the Labour Act.
In May 2023, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) accused Mr. Yunus and a number of other others of misusing the employees’ welfare fund of Grameen Bank and regularising 101 employees members. After a prolonged trial, Mr. Yunus and his colleagues had been convicted in January this 12 months, mere days after Ms. Hasina started her fourth consecutive time period as Prime minister.
“We have incurred the annoyance of someone because of chasing the three zero dream (zero poverty, zero unemployment and zero net carbon emissions),” stated Dr. Yunus after his conviction, as hundreds pleaded with the then-PM to pardon him.
Within six months, chaos and violence was unleashed in Bangladesh as a consequence of anti-quota protests, resulting in a stringent crackdown by police. As pupil protestors sought one single demand – the resignation of Sheikh Hasina, the 78-year-old politician fled to India, ending her 15-year reign. Now Ms. Hasina, whose authorities sought to incarcerate him, is out of energy and in a foreign country, whereas Mr. Yunus is heading an interim authorities, tasked with overseeing an orderly political transition.