Micro lending in India

One of the comments on my previous blog post on Micro lending points to a couple of micro lending opportunities available in India. As I mentioned in my updated post, MicroPlace is available only to residents of the USA.

The two sites mentioned in the comment, Dhanax.com and RangDe.org have been on my radar for a month or so now. I am still not convinced about how secure the organizations that run these sites are.

The first site I tried was Dhanax and I could find only two organizations that we registered as borrowers. Also their page accepting Bank and other personal information was on Http and not secure (https). I did send a couple of mails to them about this and got no response. That is one of the reasons I have not recommended this site. If an organization does not respond to mails from people registered with it, then I don't think they are yet ready to be entrusted with money.

I started looking at RangDe fairly recently. Again the site is not secure, but they seem to use the ICICI secure site for credit card transactions. So atleast that information goes over the web via a secure tunnel. But the reason I have not committed yet is that their fee structure is something that does not make sense to me yet. The investor get 3.5% interest and the fees is 5%?? Also most microfinance loans are at interest rates in excess of 20%. So I am kind of not yet sure on the 8.5% rate. But I have still not close out on this one.

I will post an update once I spend sometime with these two sites. If any of my readers have indeed used these sites, I would appreciate any comments or feedbacks. Also if you or someone you know are involved in these sites/companies, I would like to hear from you too..

Update (20/Apr/09)

• I have got some kind of a response from Dhanax. They say they are in the process of changing their site to use Https. Let us wait and see.
• Also I have taken the plunge into RangDe. Though I have not yet taken this to be a full fledged part of my ML portfolio, I have taken the first step now. Lets see how it progresses.

Comments

[Ramajayam]

Do u say that Dhanx is not trust worthy?

[Anand Mukundan]

Thanks for the comment Ramajayam,

Well, atleast I am not getting any response from them when I send them an email asking for information. That makes me very suspicious. As of now, I do not trust my money to them.

Also I am worried that a site that accepts bank information does so on a non secure connection. I shudder to think how it is stored. RangDe also accepts a lot of the personal info on non-https pages, but their payment gateway is the icici bank's gateway. Atleast that is secure and I kind of trust that as I have used it for other credit card payments before.

--Anand