Vikram Akula

36

India

Finance

Founder and CEO, SKS Microfinance

Vikram Akula was born in India but he left for the United States at the age of 3. He spent his childhood in New York and went on to study at Yale University. He completed his PhD from the University of Chicago. As a child, Vikram would come to India and visit the villages. On one such visit, he witnessed the impoverished state of the Indian population in the rural areas. This sight left an indelible mark in his mind which made him give up a cushy job at McKinsey and start a finance venture for the villagers in a bid to eradicate poverty.

Vikram Akula came to India and worked for an NGO for about three years. In this period, Vikram realized the tremendous impact that microfinance made. But he also saw a flaw in the fact that microfinance wasn’t scaling up to very big numbers and so he decided to set up a new system which treated microfinance more as a business than philanthropy. He started SKS Microfinance, which provides low cost financing exclusively to the feminine sect at a particular interest rate. The company grew from strength to strength and with financial backing from major players like Citibank and ICICI, it now has more than 6,50,000 borrowers across the country with 65,000 new borrowers coming in every month. This venture has gone a long way in eradicating poverty in the rural areas by encouraging rural enterprises and making the villagers financially independent.

There are many who work hard, educate themselves, develop various skills and then head westwards looking for greener pastures. But here is one man who has come from the ‘land of dreams’ with an even bigger dream - to eradicate poverty in his homeland by making the rural population financially independent. In recognition of this effort, the TIME magazine has named Vikram Akula as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Though widely credited for bringing about the microfinance revolution in India, Vikram Akula has not fallen short of passing on the credit to the real pioneers of microfinance. He states, “We have become leaders in micro-finance, but that is because of the pioneering work of many before us . . . Mohammad Yunus of Gramin Bank, the Daan Foundation. . . there are many who have come before us; we have taken it to the next level, but it’s part of the movement.”

• SKS Microfinance has been recorded as one of the fastest growing microfinance organizations in the world with a 170% growth and 99% on time return rate.