Vijay Mahajan

Vijay's first job was at the electronics multinational company Philips in a marketing position. He worked there for four years, travelling mostly in the small towns and rural parts of the Northeastern states, with headquarter in Guwahati for two years. Later he was moved to Kolkata and got exposed to the eastern Indian states of India - Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal for two years.

After his MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, inspired by Professors Ravi Matthai, Ranjit Gupta and Kamla Chowdhry, Vijay joined a Gandhian NGO, ASSEFA in Bihar in mid 1982, working to settle landless poor people on Bhoodan (gifted land) they had received. This involved projects of land and water development, starting agriculture and adding allied activities. After turning around the initial project in Gaya, he set up new projects in Jamui and Deoghar districts and then many more in other northern states.

Mahajan sought the help of ASSEFA staff to work on the idea of professionals working at the grassroots, assisting NGOs and poor communities in development action. This led to the birth of PRADAN or "professional assistance for development action". Pradan in Hindi means "to give in exchange" as against dan which means "to give in charity".

In October 1983, PRADAN was established as a non-profit society and was funded by the Ford Foundation. Vijay became its first executive director. Continuing his work with ASSEFA, Vijay inducted a number of young professionals from the IITs, IIMs and top agricultural universities to work with ASSEFA as well as other NGOs such as MYRADA, Seva Mandir, Anand Niketan Ashram, Mahila Jagaran Samiti and Gram Vikas, Orissa. By 1986, PRADAN began its own direct work with rural poor communities, starting with the tribals of the Kesla block in Hoshangabad district of Madhya pradesh to the dalit carcass flayers of Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh to the tasar silk reares of Santhal Parganas of Bihar (now Jharkhand). Vijay topped up this flush of innovative projects by setting up three separate types of collaborative projects – for wasteland development with small NGOs in Purulia, West Bengal; for income-generation with ITC near its cigarette factories in Munger, Bihar and Saharanpur, UP; and with the local panchayats and district/block level government agencies in the Kishangarh Bas block of Alwar district in Rajasthan.

In keeping with the leadership norms then prevalent in his alma mater IIMA, he stepped down from the Executive Directorship after serving a five-year term. Deep Joshi, who had joined PRADAN in 1986, took over as the second Executive Director of PRADAN. Vijay then went for a year's fellowship to the Princeton University. On his return, he worked in PRADAN for a year and a half. He spent the initial few months with Mr Laxmi Chand Jain and Smt Ela Bhatt, who were both senior development activists then serving as Members of the Planning Commission of India. He also got involved with the Janata Party which espoused the two ideas Vijay believed in - social justice and equality (known in short as pro-Mandal, because of the name of the person who headed a government commission which laid out this policy for so called other backward classes or OBCs) and secularism (known as pro-Masjid, because by then there was an agitation to build a Ram temple at a site which had a Babri mosque, which staunch Hindus believed was built by destroying a temple). But by 1991, the Mandal-Masjid controversy snow-balled and the politics around it became so involved that Vijay could not persist in it.

In 1992, Vijay was joined by Thomas Fisher, whom he had met in Princeton and along with whom and a third colleague, Geoffrey Onegi-Obel, and they together established a US registered non-profit NGO called VikaSoko (a word synthesised from Vikas meaning development in Hindi and Soko meaning marketplace in Swahili). They then offered services as development consultants and researchers and also as trainers, but with a focus exclusively on the issue of livelihoods.

Their first assignment was for the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Government-in-Exile in Dharamsala, whom they worked with to produce the first Integrated Development Plan for the 120,000 Tibetan community in exile.[6] Subsequently, they carried out a study of the Rural Non-Farm Sector in India,[7] for the Indian National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC). Another study was of the SEWA Bank[8] for the Ford Foundation and a third one of financial services for the rural poor and women,[9] for the World Bank.

In 1996, realising the need to attract mainstream financial resources, Vijay conceptualised BASIX,[10][11][12] a new generation institution devoted to promoting a large number of livelihoods for the poor and women on a sustainable basis. BASIX[13][14] established Bhartiya Samruddhi Finance Ltd (BSFL), which was among the first microfinance companies in the world to attract commercial debt and equity investments, both internationally and from within India. It also offers a range of services including savings and insurance, agricultural, livestock and non-farm enterprise development, and institutional development to rural producers and their groups.[15][14] Some of his early colleagues at BASIX were BL Parthasarathy, Ashok Singha, Sankar Datta, MS Sriram, and D Sattaiah.