We welcome you, the reader, to comment on the articles, and add your own reflection, criticisms, stories, links to relevant online articles, and so on.
In this issue:
Early in August 2010, eight students graduated from the Tata-Dhan Academy to enter into their careers in the development sector. They represented our ninth batch of graduates. To date, more than one hundred students—117 students from 17 states to be precise—have moved on from the Academy to help to improve the lives of thousands of people throughout India. These graduates are working on diverse projects ranging from primary education to water management to self-help group promotion to environmental protection to… well… at the Tata-Dhan Academy, we like to think that our graduates would be able to handle anything that is put in front of them!
Continue reading “A Decade’s Experience of Development Management Education”
Last week, as part of the Communication for Development course offered at the Academy, PDM 9 students plus Krishnamurthi and Ananda (CODE Discipline faculty) piled into one of the Academy’s vans and headed off to Nagapattinam to see firsthand what community radio is all about.
It’s “Managerial Oral Communication” time again, and one of the things we typically do in this course is have at least one group discussion. Here’s the prompt for our most recent one:
A Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) paper began with the following text:
Over the past two decades, institutions that make microloans to low-income borrowers in developing and transition economies have focused increasingly on making their lending operations financially sustainable by charging interest rates that are high enough to cover all their costs. They argue that doing so will best ensure the permanence and expansion of the services they provide. Sustainable (i.e., profitable) microfinance providers can continue to serve their clients without needing ongoing infusions of subsidies, and can fund exponential growth of services for new clients by tapping commercial sources, including deposits from the public.
The problem is that administrative costs are inevitably higher for tiny microlending than for normal bank lending. For instance, lending $100,000 in 1,000 loans of $100 each will obviously require a lot more in staff salaries than making a single loan of $100,000. Consequently, interest rates in sustainable microfinance institutions (MFIs) have to be substantially higher than the rates charged on normal bank loans.
Are the interest rates charged by MFIs justifiable?
Check out the 20 minute discussion that the PDM 9 students had on the topic after the jump….
Continue reading “Are the interest rates charged by MFIs justifiable?”
After an extremely long break in updating this site (over a year!) the Tata-Dhan Academy is happy to resume publishing with this video produced by the eight batch of PDM students titled “The Beginning…”
The video was produced as part of the “Audio-Visual Communication for Development” elective course offered with the support of DHAN Foundation’s Centre for Development Communication. Our sincere thanks go to P Krishnamurthi and his team who were able to put the polishing touches on this video.
By Lim Mate
In TDA hostel.
Nobody knows about the existence of the wonder table which was hidden in the closet in a tight unserious garage-like room behind the library. Nobody was truly enthralled to get a hand with the flat red-black bat, hitting the feathery light golden ball bouncing on the table. In fact, it’s different from volleyball and cricket. Then the sports fortnight was about to begin.
It has been a while since I’ve even had a chance to visit this site, much less update it. But that’s because we’ve had a few busy months here at the Academy. So, what’s been going on?
As on 15 August 2008, we have received 18 new applications for PDM 9.
For these applicants, please note that:
Interested candidates who were unable to meet the 15 August 2008 application deadline can walk in with a completed application on the test date.
>> Thanks to Suneetha for the update! <<
Discussions regarding PDM 9 have been somewhat quiet, and I think that many people are uncertain how to interpret this silence. The series of comments at the “About this site” page—comments which come from a TDA faculty, a current PDM student, and a PDM 9 student—are an indicator of this uncertainty. In this post, I will present a few of my views on the admissions situation; I welcome a lively discussion on this topic!
The DHAN Academy 