Micro-finance pioneer to give parliamentary lecture in India

I / Dhaka September 1, 2009, 17:22 IST

Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, whose experiment of poor men's banking in Bangladesh helped establish micro-credit movement across the developing world, will deliver this year's Hiren Mukherjee memorial lecture in December. 

"He has been invited to deliver the second Hiren Mukerjee Memorial Annual Parliamentary Lecture on December 9," Lamiya Morshed, the spokesman of Grameen Bank that was founded by Yunus, told PTI. 

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee invited Yunus to give the lecture, which was delivered by another renowned economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen last year, she said. 

The lecture was introduced after Hiren Mukherjee-- five time member of the Lok Sabha from 1952 to 1977, deputy leader of the Communist party in Parliament (1952-64) and then its leader from 1964 to 1967 — died in 2004.

Yunus and his Grameen bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The Bank grants small loans to the poor with no collateral.  

He was awarded the Presidential Memorial of Freedom by US President Barak Obama earlier this month along with 16 prominent global personalities. Only four of them were from outside the US.