Our friends at The Better India featured us on their site recently! Here's some of what they said:
People usually lend a loan against something of value – a guarantee of sorts. This is so much better,” says Murugayee Raju about Milaap, an online micro-lending platform that turned her life around after a gruesome fight for drinking water
Clad in her tattered cottons, Murugayee Raju looks up at the camera – resplendent, her smile and poised stature reiterating that she doesn’t intend to pose. That despite being fifty-four, working at construction sites and running a house of nine, she is genuinely happy. Ask for her secret and she gradually unravels the nightmare that was her life a few months ago and how it all changed.
In a small house in Musiri, a village near Trichy, Murugayee has been living with her husband, three sons, their two wives (one died) and three grandchildren. Apart from doing odd jobs in construction, Murugayee makes mats, and is a cleaner at a school nearby. Life had always meant hardships. “Eleven days after giving birth, I was back at a farm, chopping firewood,” says Murugayee with a smile, which soon fades as she narrates her story. “For a long time, we relied on public water supply and the local bore well to run the house,” she recalls and explains how the bore well water was very salty and required a lot of pumping. Hence her husband and she queued up at public water supplies every time. But the supply lasted exactly for an hour, as a result of which they would have to drop whatever they were doing at the time to go fill water. If they were working or tending to cattle, they would end up missing the supply.
However, landing up on time to fetch water wasn’t always an advantage. Sometimes, horrible fights broke out and depending on the local policemen every time was not working, she tells us. One day, a fight got quite out of hand and a heavy blow landed Murugayee in the hospital with a deep gash in her head and her husband with an injured nose and broken teeth. The couple ended up spending over Rs 10,000 on medical expenses.
Read the rest of the story here! Thank you for covering us guys!
To learn more on how you can help someone like Murgayee with a small amount through online lending, click here!
