The idea of Rang De was sown in the year 2006, the same year when Prof. Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with Grameen Bank. The motivation for starting Rang De was the belief that the peer to peer lending model could be leveraged to lower the cost of microcredit. RangDe.Org went live on January 26th 2008 and this is the belief system that has shaped Rang De.
The name Rang De was decided after a lot of thought and it goes back to India's patriotic struggle for Independence. We believe that a similar movement with the same kind of urgency is required to address poverty in India. The words Rang De also denote colour and exuberance and that is the impact we want our efforts to have for the people we reach out to.
Our vision is to make poverty history in India by reaching out to underserved communities through microcredit. We strive to do this through a network of committed field partners and social investors and offer microcredit that will have a positive impact on business, education, health and environment of the communities we work with.
Transparency, Creativity, Leadership, Teamwork and Responsible lending are the core values that Rang De is based on. We believe that we are not just a non-profit peer to peer lending platform. We are as much about social change as we are to do with technology and as much about investing time as we are about investing money.
Rang De is registered as a non-profit organisation because we strongly believe that we are on a mission and cannot afford to lose focus. Not wanting to concentrate on the argument about profit or non profit, our single minded focus is to ensure that our borrowers pay interest rates that are fair and our social investors can make a meaningful difference to other people's lives.
We believe that we need to be sustainable and scale meaningfully. We get a nominal cut of 1% on all the loans repaid by our borrowers. We believe this will help us achieve our goals in the long run.