Nobel Laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus.

MUMBAI: Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus on Saturday called for a social stock market to list a new variety of business — social business — to do good to people on a no loss, no dividend basis.

Delivering the second Rajiv Gandhi oration at the University of Mumbai here, he said human beings not only enjoyed making money but were also being good to others.

"But while doing social business, we do not want to lose money, we want to reach out to people."

People needed help in the areas of health, education, safe drinking water and cheap medicine.

Profit maximisation need not be the only aim. Just as in the conventional stock market where people looked to the best business houses to invest in, the social stock market would also have a listing of businesses in which people could put their money.

In social business one was the owner and one could keep it alive oneself, while in philanthropy, one was constantly looking out for money to give others.

Speaking on "Micro credit and the Millennium Development Goals," Prof. Yunus said citizens, instead of dumping responsibility on the state, could fulfil it their own way by changing the rules.

Poverty was not created by the poor but by the system and the framework and theories taught in classrooms. "For a world without poverty we have to go back to those very concepts and free them."

For instance, banks refused to extend their services to two-thirds of the world population, creating a financial apartheid. They made it appear it was the people's fault that they were not creditworthy. But the question was whether the banks were people-worthy.

Own mechanism

In the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which he founded, seven million women were owners and it evolved its own mechanism to dispense credit to the poor.

The bank had 99 per cent recovery and 58 per cent of the borrowers were rid of poverty.

"Our goal is to make sure all our borrowers are out of poverty by 2015."

The rest of the world was only going to halve poverty by 2015 as part of the target set under the Millennium Development Goals.

Disoriented

The lecture was organised by the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Contemporary Studies in the university.

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