Bandhan

Bandhan Bank is the only bank to have come out of eastern India since Independence, and it began with very little. Its founder, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, was the son of a sweet vendor, and he started the venture with Rs 2 lakh, everything he had saved in his life. Tamal Bandyopadhyay traces how that small start grew into a bank.

The turning point came on 17 June 2015, when Ghosh walked out of the Reserve Bank of India building in Mumbai holding a banking licence. Several of the country's leading corporate houses had also been in the race, and he had beaten them to it. The licence made up for years of setbacks along the way. A year later Bandhan Bank opened its doors with 6.7 million small borrowers already on its books.

The book asks how Ghosh built the country's largest microfinance institution from nothing and then, with his team, turned it into a universal bank. It also tells his own story: a boy raised in small-town Agartala, held back by poverty but determined to make something of himself. Along the way he faced rivals, hostile moneylenders, a harsh economic climate and a constant shortage of resources.

Few people in India understand the mind of a small borrower as well as Ghosh does, or know how to do business with the poor and still make it pay. Part business history and part life story, this is one of the country's great entrepreneurial journeys.