Arvin Dang

Arvin Dang
Sustainable and Realistic: Committed to the trickle down effect

By Erica Schlaikjer
This article was printed in Abroad View Fall 2006

Arvin Dang wants to be as cool as Spiderman, as generous as Bill Gates, and as heroic as Robin Hood. Dang remembers the precise moment that inspired him to help the poor.

When he moved to India three years ago, a beggar approached him—an elderly man with a scarf of rags around his head and a bucket hanging off of his mangled thumb. Dang reached out to give him a coin, but as soon as their hands touched…

“I freaked,” Dang says. “I thought I was going to get leprosy.”

The second after Dang retracted his hand, he felt remorse for the man.

“I made that guy feel really low in life, and I really hated myself for that,” he says. “I decided then that my life aim is to sort out my country.”

Dang was born in Bangkok and raised in Hong Kong and Singapore; he now resides in Bombay. He has always had a general interest in volunteerism, which stems from the Sikh tradition of seva, or selfless service.

He volunteered as a mentor for Oxford’s equal opportunity program to help ethnic minorities and inner city youth apply to the university. Dang raised money for Salaam Baalak Trust in Bombay, an organization that provides support services for street and working children in Mumbai, Bhubaneswar, and Delhi. He also volunteered at an orphanage in Ladakh, India.

Despite his individual volunteering efforts, Dang says he is more interested in practical large-scale sustainable development. He is a big believer in capitalism, globalization, free markets, finance, and access to credit. In his application to participate as a delegate for the International Youth Volunteerism Summit (IYVS) at Northwestern University, Dang proposed a micro-credit plan for rural India that would lend money to people who are too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans, in partnership with state institutions.
“It was sustainable and realistic—I wasn’t trying to reinvent some economic concept,” he says. “It’s not some grandiose plan to change the world.”

A strong believer in the benefits of the “trickle down effect,” Dang says he is committed to keeping his proposal feasible and, initially, small scale through the implementation of pilot programs.
“In economic development, you don’t necessarily help the poorest people first because they are not in the position to reap the benefits of the aid,” he says. “Aim for the place where you can have the most impact.”
In addition to his IYVS proposal, Dang directed his entrepreneurial spirit toward an online micro-finance project that he started with friends from Oxford. Still in its initial phases of development, the Web-based program allows users to review each other’s credit ratings and secure short-term, low-interest loans in a decentralized system.

“It’s sort of like the Napster for lending and borrowing money,” he says.

The team is still working on potential legal issues, such as money laundering, but Dang likes the idea of starting his own company.

“I get motivated by making money—I get a buzz—but I don’t really care about spending money. I think about what I could do with it.”

Among his many plans to improve social justice and equality—as well as to build his own fortune—Dang wants to build affordable, public housing and parking spaces in India to ease homelessness and overcrowding. He says he looks up to people like Gates, who donated $900 million for tuberculosis research. He also admires Spiderman superhero Peter Parker for his sacrifices and humility. And, similar to Robin Hood, he wants to inspire the rich to lend to the poor.

“I feel obliged,” he says. “I don’t think I could live my life and be happy without having done something meaningful.”