It was poverty that made Chandra Shekhar Ghosh rich. CEO and managing director of Bandhan Bank , Ghosh learnt from poverty important lessons of his life and framed his worldview, while it also gave him a business idea that grew into a legend.The man who spent a good part of his life interacting with extremely poor people in rural areas of Bangladesh and eastern India has been feted by the markets now. Kolkata-based private lender Bandhan Bank on Tuesday made a dream market debut. The scrip got listed at Rs 499 on the NSE, a 33 per cent premium to the issue price of Rs 375. The Rs 4,473 crore IPO was subscribed 14.62 times.As of December 31, 2017, the bank had 887 branches and 430 ATMs, together serving over 2.13 million general banking customers in east and northeast India.Born in a village in Greater Tripura in 1960, Ghosh was the eldest of six siblings in a joint family of 15 and his father ran a small sweet shop. Ghosh sold milk and gave private tuitions to support himself.After doing his MA in Statistics from Dhaka University, Bangladesh, in 1985, Ghosh joined Dhaka-based BRAC, an international development non-profit working for women empowerment in small villages in Bangladesh.What he saw there changed his life and sowed the seeds of Bandhan Bank. Extreme poverty was more crippling for women who were also ill-treated by their husbands. Ghosh realised those women had the power to improve their lives only if they received some monetary help.After working with Village Welfare Society, a non-profit, in West Bengal for several years, Ghosh gave wings to his idea to empower poor women—microfinance. He started his own company, Bandhan-Konnagar, in 2001 to give small loans to poor women with a meager amount of Rs 2 lakh most of which was borrowed from relatives."The name Bandhan was chosen with care as it means togetherness, I was on mission to connect society," Ghosh says. “I travelled to small villages in Hooghly district to convince women to taken loans from us for their business or fund their children’s education, but initially they eyed me with a suspicion."In 2009, he registered Bandhan as a non-banking finance company and became the first microfinance institution in 2014 to receive a banking licence in India.In his book, Bandhan: The Making of a Bank, Tamal Bandyopadhyay writes about Gosh's time at the Dhaka University where he had to live in the campus temple as he had little money to support himself. " One day, his bicycle got stolen from the university campus. Borhannbhai (Borhann Uddin, a statistics professor) lent him his old Phoenix cycle which brought the smile back to Ghosh’s face. Until recently, he was driving a Toyota Fortuner; now he has a Land Rover Discovery in his garage," writes Bandyopadhyay.