This is the life story of an individual who with perseverance and determination changed the profile and outlook of a fishing community in the coastal village of Manipal in Karnataka, India.
With bank mergers taking place and banks losing their identity, here is a little-known story of once-private Syndicate Bank, which started with a 25-paise deposit...
There are three reasons why Syndicate Bank is important in the evolution of India as a wealth generator, and for working towards the upliftment of the masses.
Firstly, it was born out of a belief that an innovative person cannot really generate wealth for himself on a sustainable basis unless he works out a way to make his community wealthy as well.
Secondly, it was the only large bank in India to locate its headquarters in a rural area – in the 1930s Manipal was still a village.
Thirdly, even before CK Prahalad arrived on the scene, its promoters knew about how wealth could be found at the bottom of the pyramid.
At a time when all banks insisted on Rs 5 as the minimum deposit amount to open an account, Syndicate's promoters opened accounts with just 25 paise.
Unfortunately, this is a story that most management schools too do not teach.
The bank itself was a brainchild of Tonse Madhav Anant Pai, who went to Bangalore to study medicine.
He excelled in his studies, and when earning his licence to practise medicine, he went back home to the fishing village of Malpe.
He asked his parents if he could go to Japan for further studies, but was told sternly by his mother that he should stay in the same village and practice medicine for the welfare of the people he grew up with.
That broke the boy's heart. He wanted to study more.
And he knew that a fishing village would provide him neither money, nor the intellectual challenge.
He was proved right. In six months' time, he confirmed that a fishing village had only colds, fevers, diarrhoea, dysentery and indigestion as regular ailments.
He tried persuading his parents one more time to let him go overseas for further studies.
Once again, he was rebuffed. His relatives would talk of how the boy would go to sleep sobbing into his pillow crying over the unfairness of life.
Till one day, he had his Eureka moment. He realised that one reason why he was not earning enough was because the people around him were also not earning enough.
Could he change that?
He began strategizing a social revolution that India had never seen or imagined.
He knew, as a doctor, that children are brought o doctors invariably by mothers; seldom by fathers.
So he focussed on the women who came to him. He began urging them not to let their children end up like their fathers who were good only for fishing and then getting drunk when they returned to home base.
The cleaning of the fish, selling them, managing provisions, balancing incomes with expenses was left to women.
If there was any surplus money, the man demanded it, and got drunk with that money.
So he urged the women to save.
But they told him that there wasn't enough money for saving. He would then ask them to show how much money they had. They would show him a few coins.
He would gently take a 25 paise coin from each woman and tell her to start with this.
Since he was not a bank, he kept two notebooks for each woman – one kept with him and the other with the woman.
He told them that he would send his compounder over to her house every day when the husband was not around.
If they could save 25 paise, the amount would be registered in both the notebooks.
The scheme, backed by constant persuasions and exhortations, worked.
Women began saving. In a few months, Pai realised he had more than a thousand rupees – which translates into a few lakhs using today's valuations.
The 25 paise deposit scheme came to be known as the Pygmy Deposit scheme.
It was time to go to phase 2 of the plan. He told them that their children were falling ill very frequently because they consumed only fish and rice.
He urged them to give the children a glass of milk every day. That was impossible. A glass of milk was unaffordable.
So Pai urged them to buy a cow for their houses.
They laughed: "We cannot afford a glass of milk, and you want us to buy a cow?".
But Pai gently told them that he could finance the cows for the women.
And repayment was also painless, he explained: "Just give your child a glass of milk, and I shall purchase the rest of the milk from you and adjust the cost of the cow.
You don't have to do anything else."
It took a while to persuade the first woman.
But when she agreed, it was a game of "me too".
Within a short while, there were so many cows in the village that Pai could not purchase all their milk.
He therefore formed a milk cooperative.
To handle the amount of money coming in he started a bank - Canara Industrial and Banking Syndicate Ltd - with its headquarters in Manipal.
The first branch of the bank started its operations in 1925 at Udupi in Karnataka.
By 1937, it had secured its membership as a clearinghouse in Mumbai.
He then started weavers' cooperatives, who too were financed by the bank.
Then to benefit the community he began schools, then colleges and then institutions that taught engineering and medicine.
This complex later became the prestigious Manipal Educational Complex.
In fact, to grow the bank, Pai used to look around for good businessmen, who had the urge to grow and both the ability and willingness to repay the amounts borrowed.
In one of his travels, he met a trader, whom he helped get a yarn licence from the government. That businessman was Dhirubhai Ambani, And that is how a member of the Pai family remained on the board of Reliance Industries as long as he was alive.
(from reliable sources on the Internet ..)
The Chairman of the Indian Railway Board Pradeep Yadav recently made a very startling disclosure that Indians will soon be able to travel in luxury and comfort in private trains on Indian tracks by as early as 2024.
As an experiment on privatisation, IRCTC (a quasi govt agency under Railways) is offering two rakes called Tejas on private basis where each customer is given a Rs 25 lakh personal insurance, in addition the customer is given preferences on the pick-up and delivery of passengers and their luggage from homes to destination, including the type of food and the type of accommodation etc. The flexibility offered to the passenger is possible only because it is run as a private entity.
The immediate advantage is less use of paper and stationery. We are giving a live model to the student community and the community at large at what are sustainable initiatives that we undertake at the University. 
Section A - objective type
Throughout life, we cultivate positive relationships with our extended family, friends and accomplices and more often than not we get occasional doses of these positive feedback from them, which make us happy and contented.
This is the life story of an individual who with perseverance and determination changed the profile and outlook of a fishing community in the coastal village of Manipal in Karnataka, India. 
If we are ready to spare some time and effort to prepare the quiz, the administration of the quiz is easy, whether it be for 10 persons or ten thousand persons. It is just the question of initial botheration of preparing the quiz.
The Taj hotel group had invited Mr. Masai Imai from Japan to hold a workshop for its staff.
The public was keen to know why Byju's was only in the conventional area and restricting itself to just the primary, upper primary, high school and secondary school sections providing learning content augmenting classroom teaching and not to the degree colleges and higher education in the country. Byju is also in the competitive exam area that decides on entry to the Indian institutes of Technology through the Joint Entrance exam (JEE) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) through the Common Admission Test (CAT), besides medical entrance exam NEET and Civil service preparation examination for IAS and other central government services of Gazetted positions.. 
