What do you do when an MBA in International Business coupled with six years of experience in the US and UK in a range of companies including Agribusiness, Investment Research, Private Equity, Venture Capital and Telecom, is simply not enough. How long can you curb your entrepreneurial instinct and a yen for contributing to social development?

Not too long as Harsha Moily, the founder, chairman and CEO of Moksha-Yug Access (MYA), a for-profit entity, active in Bagalkot district of Karnataka, discovered. Explains Moily, “During my later years abroad, I realised how important India was to the world. But I found that the focus of foreign investments and technology was channeled only towards urban India, which only widened the divide between the rich and the poor. I decided to start a company which would capitalise on the phenomenal economic growth in urban India to create an organised platform in rural areas to alleviate poverty and foster wealth creation in rural India.”

Moily approached ICICI Bank as he had heard of its foray into microfinance and received information on the subject. The Bank arranged field visits to best performing MFIs, provided exposure to state of the art technology initiatives in the sector and offered invitations to training programmes as well as introductions to venture capitalists.

The key issues facing the poor in this region include a lack of access to a range of financial services and quality healthcare, no linkage to income generating opportunities, and a huge untapped potential for agribusiness. Despite an existing structure of cooperative banks and nationalised banks, the poor in the region rely mainly on local moneylenders and chit funds, which charge a very high interest rate.

Today, MYA is a new MFI partner with ICICI Bank and hopes to work with 50,000 people and help them make substantial changes in their living conditions within the next one year. Over the next five years, MYA plans to cover every village in the districts of Bagalkot, Bijapur and Belgaum to reach 1.3 million clients.

“We believe that a one-stop suite of financial services coupled with linkage to rural livelihood activities and an ICT enabled infrastructure would help attract more SHGs thereby, increasing our ability to scale up in the three districts”, says Moily.

In the first year of its operations MYA will focus on establishing the organisational foundations including systems and people in an ICT enabled environment in preparation of the rapid scaling up in the three districts. That is after all the cornerstone of an ambitious and sustainable plan to create wealth for the poor in one part of rural Karnataka.