Village Diary of a Heretic Banker

Village Diary of A Heretic Banker is more a diary than an instructive guide. The diary provides the flavour of the author?s personal experiences as a rural banker and his engagement with the poor in the remote crannies of India. The seed around which the book crystallises is the intrinsic tenacity and grit of poor rural women that can be harnessed into energetic powerhouses to drive our rural society onto the road to prosperity. The book carries in its pages the poignant nostalgia of the author for villages but it is also tinged at places with rage and despair. The message in this book is that there is no grand, universal formula for poverty reduction. The battle has to be fought on several fronts and what works in one place does not necessarily work everywhere. The way forward lies in grassroots field experiments for understanding the causal relationships in poor people?s behaviour and in learning by doing. The author?s faith in poor people?s ability to climb out of the rut is unshakeable and his core belief is gradualism. The author believes that lasting social change most often and perhaps always comes slowly rather than in a burst of revolutionary fervour.