From selling milk to creating a Rs 30000 crore bank: Meet Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, the founder of Bandhan Bank

Chandra Shekhar Ghosh went from survival against the odds to creating a mammoth lending machinery. The story of Bandhan Bank, which started as a not-for-profit enterprise empowering women through financial inclusion, is an inspiring one. Similar is the story of its founder Chandra Shekhar Ghosh.

A rich man today, Ghosh was once on the other end of the financial spectrum, struggling to make ends meet. Not letting adversity get the better of him, he is today the man running the show for a bank with a valuation in excess of Rs 30,000 crore.

To make ends meet, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh had to sell milk during his early years. Son of a small sweets shop owner, Ghosh hails from Tripura. To fund studies, he gave tuitions to children. While supporting his father at his shop, Ghosh completed his Master’s degree in Statistics from Dhaka University.

The young Chandra Shekhar Ghosh then took a job that paid a meagre salary of Rs 5000. He kept up with the job for many years in order to sustain his family. But then he finally decided to break free and do something different by late 1990s.

He was appointed the program head at a village welfare society in Bangladesh working towards women empowerment. It was here that he got the idea to support enterprising women and started a microfinance unit to give small loans to them in 2001.

Slowly and steadily, the institution grew and Ghosh eventually launched Bandhan financial services in 2015. Today, Bandhan Bank has more than 5,500 banking outlets and is operational in 34 out of the 36 Indian states and union territories with over 2.35 crore customers.