It was March 2005 and Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit pioneer who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, had just agreed — over a handshake during lunch at a Paris restaurant — to start a “social business” with the head of Groupe Danone, the French food company.

Mr. Yunus’s Grameen Bank and Danone would recoup only their original investment and a 1 percent profit, reinvesting the rest into the enterprise. But unsure that his new partner, Franck Riboud, Danone’s chief executive, completely comprehended the unusual concept, Mr. Yunus dashed an e-mail message from the car to spell out what they had discussed and asking for a confirmation.

“I still couldn’t believe he understood what I said, because his English is not very good and my English is not very good, either,” Mr. Yunus recalled during a recent visit to New York. “So, I said we should put it on record and a few minutes later I got the confirmation.”

Last month, Grameen Danone, as the new company is named, opened the first of what are to be 50 fortified-yogurt plants in Bangladesh. Zinédine Zidane, the French soccer star who is an “ambassador” for Danone’s programs for children, attended the opening and drew frenzied media attention to the venture.

Over the last year and a half, officials from Danone and Grameen met in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, under Mr. Yunus’s direction to plan the business to suit the needs and challenges of the country, said Laurent Sacchi, senior vice president at Danone, who sits on the joint venture’s board.

For instance, upon Mr. Yunus’s insistence, the company agreed to build 50 small, labor-intensive plants rather than one large and highly automated one as it does in the rest of the world, so more workers and suppliers would benefit from it.

As Mr. Yunus accepts the Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow, the anecdote serves as an example of his persistent and tireless efforts on behalf of the poor. Mr. Yunus, a former professor of economics, met recently with reporters and editors of The New York Times. Following are excerpts:

Q. Microcredit has been in operation in Bangladesh, India and many other places for some years, yet poverty remains entrenched in these countries. What are the most fundamental barriers to alleviating poverty in your mind?

A. My position has been that poverty has not been created by the poor people. The system has created them. The system being institutions, the concepts or framework of living. That’s where the seed of poverty is. Either we pluck them out so that poverty disappears or if this is so involved that you cannot pick them out, you have to create an institution which is free from this virus.

So we go step by step, concept by concept and institution by institution. We picked one institution that is banking. There may be something wrong there that we can fix. So we created another kind of banking — banking which doesn’t depend on collateral.

That’s what my interest is. I’m not stopping at what I’m saying is microcredit. I’m saying information technology is a very important thing. And there are other issues.

Q. Can you talk a little about the relative merits of nonprofit microcredit versus it as a business model and whether that is more sustainable, perhaps?

A. First of all, I’m not in favor of nonprofit things. These are charities. I’m not involved in that. I don’t particularly get excited about it. I’m talking about the business part of it where you do things so that you get your money back.

And there you have a distinction between two kinds: one, to make personal gain out of it. The other one, the way we run the business, for the results we want to produce in people. So one is a profit-maximizing business. The other is a social business. I’m on the social business side of it. If somebody wants to run it as a profit-maximizing business, welcome. This is competition. My mission is to get the person out of poverty rather than how much money I’m making out of it.

Q. Is there any way for you to know, or to guess, how much difference your company has made? What would your country be like without it?

A. One way to look at what we have done is to look within our families, the seven million families that we have worked with. We monitor it every day, every year, to see how many of them have gotten out of poverty, how many of them are coming close to getting out of poverty. We have 10 indicators. If a family fulfills all the 10 indicators, then we declare that the family has gone out of poverty.

Fifty-eight percent of the borrowers of Grameen Bank who have been with Grameen Bank for five years or more have gone out of poverty, according to these 10 indicators. The indicators are: How is the roof? Is it a solid roof? Can it protect from the rain? Do they have a sanitary latrine? Do you have a mosquito net? A blanket for the winter with warm clothing is another. Do they have enough savings in the bank account? Access to pure, safe drinking water? Are all children attending a school?

Studies after studies show that income level is rising, people are getting out of poverty. A World Bank study done in the mid-90s shows their conclusion is that 5 percent of Grameen borrowers get out of poverty every year. Also, 100 percent of the children of Grameen families are in school, 100 percent. And many of them are in high schools, now in universities, medical schools, engineering schools.

Q. Do you track the children of the women whom you have financed through the bank, how far do girls go in school or how well they do professionally?

A. So far as primary education is concerned, 100 percent stay in family education. We have no problem. Now this is also true for the whole country. Our worry in Bangladesh was exactly your worry, that girls will be dropping out, mothers or fathers will keep them home and boys will go out. Secondary education presents a very interesting case in Bangladesh. Girls outnumber boys.

We give scholarships. This is grant money from the bank. We give nearly 30,000 scholarships per year. The scholarship policy is very straightforward. Fifty percent of the scholarships are reserved for girls so that they don’t have to compete with the boys. The remaining 50 percent is open to both boys and girls. As a result, about 63 to 67 percent of the students who got the scholarships are girls.

Our interest is to bring them to higher education. In higher education, girls’ participation is still very low. Although it’s a 100 percent guaranteed student loan, but that’s where parents get into the dilemma of getting them married. So they don’t want to push them into the higher education. We are encouraging them.

Q. In some countries, there’s been a problem that education has created more graduates of colleges than in fact the economy needs.

A. This is a problem. Occasionally I go around and my colleagues go around and meet with these students, not their parents. These are bright young people. It’s not easy to get into higher education in Bangladesh and India. It’s highly competitive. And the seats are limited. So unless your performance is way above, you can’t get in.

And the question finally comes: You helped us a lot, Grameen Bank is something that we see as our family. But we always wonder, when we finish our education, where are we going to get the jobs. Will you help us to find the jobs? This is a question I cannot avoid.

I came up with my kind of response to that and I’m trying to build this thing up. My response is: “Yes, I understand your position, but I have a different view. As Grameen Bank children, you should have your own position, own pledge about your life. And the pledge you make, you repeat every morning: I shall never ask for a job from anybody. I will create jobs.”

They get shocked. They say, I’m asking for a job. He says I will create jobs? How am I going to do that? Some say we don’t know how to create a job. I said, if you don’t know, if you don’t find an answer, you look at your mother, what she has done. She didn’t apply for a job. Even if she applied for a job, she will never get a job. She’s an illiterate person.

She borrowed from Grameen Bank. That’s why you are here. And as a child she helped you to go to school, maintained you and brought you all the way. You are becoming a doctor, you are becoming an engineer. See what she did? You know it much better than I do. If an illiterate woman can create her job, what good is your education if you cannot do better than your mother?

Money is not your problem. And, as an executive of the bank, I’m guaranteeing you, whatever money you need, we have the money.

OSLO, Dec. 10 — The Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, who invented the practice of making small, unsecured loans to the poor, warned today that the globalized economy was becoming a dangerous “free-for-all highway.”

“Its lanes will be taken over by the giant trucks from powerful economies,” Dr. Yunus said during a lavish ceremony at which he was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. “Bangladeshi rickshaws will be thrown off the highway.”

While international companies motivated by profit may be crucial in addressing global poverty, he said, nations must also cultivate grassroots enterprises and the human impulse to do good.

Challenging economic theories that he learned as a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville in the 1970s, he said glorification of the entrepreneurial spirit has led to “one-dimensional human beings” motivated only by profit.

Dr. Yunus, 66, then took a direct jibe at the United States for its war on terror, telling about 1,000 dignitaries at Oslo’s City Hall that recent American military campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere had diverted global resources and attention from a more pressing project: halving worldwide poverty by 2015, as envisaged by the United Nations six years ago.

“Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size,” he said. “But then came Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, and suddenly the world became derailed from the pursuit of this dream.”

He said terrorism cannot be defeated militarily and the concept of peace requires broadening. “Peace should be understood in a human way, in a broad social, political and economic way,” Dr. Yunus said.

He called for legal recognition of a new category of corporation that would be neither profit-maximizing nor nonprofit. It would be a “social business,” like Grameen Bank, the Dhaka-based microcredit institution he started 30 years ago. The bank has lent nearly $6 billion to help some of the poorest people on earth to start businesses, build shelters and go to school.

Grameen Bank — with which Dr. Yunus shared the prize today — is an interest-charging, profit-making business with more than 2,200 branches. But it is owned primarily by its poor clients and run for their benefit. Similarly structured institutions, he said, could bring health care, information technology, education and energy to the poor without requiring infusions of aid.

“By defining ‘entrepreneur’ in a broader way, we can change the character of capitalism radically and solve many of the unresolved social and economic problems within the scope of the free market,” he said.

He traveled to Oslo with nine of the bank’s board members. Four of them are among Bangladesh’s nearly 300,000 “telephone ladies,” each of whom once borrowed money to buy a mobile telephone and now earns money charging rural villagers to use it.

Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes called microcredit “a liberating force” for women and Muslims, many of whom have traditionally shunned interest-charging institutions.

“All too often, we speak one-sidedly about how much the Muslim part of the world has to learn from the West,” said Prof. Danbolt Mjoes. “Where microcredit is concerned, the opposite is true: the West has learned from Yunus, from Bangladesh, and from the Muslim part of the world.”

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) -- Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew Chile's democratically elected Marxist president in a bloody coup and ruled this Andean nation for 17 years, died Sunday, dashing hopes among many that he would see justice for his regime's abuses. He was 91.

Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara, spokesman for the medical team that had been treating Pinochet, said relatives where by his side when he died at Santiago Military Hospital, where he had been treated for a heart attack suffered on Dec. 3.

Hundreds of supporters of the former dictator, some weeping, gathered in front of the hospital chanting ''Pinochet! Pinochet! Long Live Pinochet!''

Anti-Pinochet motorists shouted insults at them and celebrations broke out in several parts of the Chilean capital.

Hugo Gutierrez, a human rights lawyer involved in several lawsuits against Pinochet, lamented that ''this criminal has departed without ever being sentenced for all the acts he was responsible for during his dictatorship.''

Lorena Pizarro, president of an association of relatives of the dictatorship's victims, noted ironically that Pinochet had died ''on Dec. 10, the international day of human rights.''

But the office of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had been a close ally of Pinochet, said she was ''greatly saddened'' by his death.

Chile's government says at least 3,197 people were killed for political reasons during his rule and thousands more disappeared, but after leaving the presidency in 1990 Pinochet escaped hundreds of criminal complaints because of his declining physical and mental health.

President Michelle Bachelet, who was imprisoned and mistreated during the dictatorship, recently said it would be ''a violation of my conscience'' to attend a state funeral for him.

Pinochet's son Marco Antonio has said that his father asked to be cremated to avoid desecration of his tomb by ''people who always hated him.'' A military funeral was likely.

Pinochet took power on Sept. 11, 1973, demanding an unconditional surrender from President Salvador Allende as warplanes bombed the presidential palace in downtown Santiago. Instead, Allende committed suicide with a submachine gun he had received as a gift from Fidel Castro.

As the mustachioed Pinochet crushed dissent during his 1973-90 rule, he left little doubt about who was in charge. ''Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it,'' he once said.

But when it came to his regime's abuses, Pinochet refused for years to take responsibility, saying any murders of political prisoners were the work of subordinates.

Then on his 91st birthday -- less than a month before his death -- he took ''full political responsibility for everything that happened'' during his long reign. The statement read by his wife, however, made no reference to the rights abuses.

Pinochet, born Nov. 25, 1915, as the son of a customs official in the port of Valparaiso, was commander of the army at the time of the 1973 coup, appointed 19 days earlier by the president he toppled.

The CIA had tried for months to destabilize the Allende government, including financing a truckers strike that paralyzed the delivery of goods across Chile, but Washington denied having anything to do with the coup.

In the days following Pinochet's seizure of power, soldiers carried out mass arrests of leftists. Tanks rumbled through the streets of the capital.

Many detainees, including Americans Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, were herded into the National Stadium, which became a torture and detention center. The Americans were among those executed by the Chilean military, their deaths chronicled in the 1982 film ''Missing.''

Other leftists were rounded up by a death squad known as the ''Caravan of Death.'' Victims were buried in unmarked mass graves in the northern Atacama desert, in the coastal city of La Serena and in the southern city of Cauquenes.

Pinochet pledged to stay in power ''only as long as circumstances demand it,'' but soon after seizing the presidency, he said he had ''goals, not deadlines.''

He disbanded Congress, banned political activity and started a harsh anti-leftist repression.

Within years, Chile and other South American countries with right-wing governments launched Operation Condor to eliminate leftist dissidents abroad. One of Operation Condor's victims was former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, who was killed along with his American aide, Ronni Moffitt, when a bomb shattered their car in Washington in 1976.

In May 2005, some of the strongest evidence against Pinochet emerged, when Gen. Manuel Contreras, the imprisoned head of the former dictatorship's secret police, gave Chile's Supreme Court a list describing the fate of more than 500 dissidents who disappeared after being arrested by the secret police. Most were killed, their bodies flung into the sea.

Contreras, who is serving a 12-year sentence for the disappearance of a young dissident in 1975, said Pinochet was responsible. Pinochet blamed all the abuses on subordinates.

Pinochet defended his authoritarian rule as a bulwark against communism -- and even claimed part of the credit for the collapse of communism. He repeatedly said he had nothing to ask forgiveness for.

''I see myself as a good angel,'' he told a Miami Spanish-language television station in 2004.

With his raspy voice, he often spoke in a lower-class vernacular that comedians delighted in mimicking. But his off-the-cuff comments sometimes got him into trouble.

Once, he embarrassed the government by saying that the German army was made up of ''marijuana smokers, homosexuals, long-haired unionists.'' On another occasion, he drew criticism by saying the discovery of coffins that each contained the bodies of two victims of his regime's repression was a show of ''a good cemetery space-saving measure.''

Shrewd and firmly in command of his army, Pinochet saw himself as the leader of a crusade to build a society free of communism. Amid the upheaval in 1973, the economy was in near ruins, partly due to the CIA's covert destabilization efforts.

Pinochet launched a radical free-market economic program that, coupled with heavy foreign borrowing and an overvalued peso, triggered a financial collapse and unprecedented joblessness in the early 1980s. Eventually, the economy recovered and since 1984 Chile has posted growth averaging 5 percent to 7 percent a year.

Key to the economic recovery was a group of mostly young economists known as the ''Chicago Boys'' for their studies under University of Chicago professor and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. They lifted most state controls over the economy, privatized many sectors and strongly encouraged foreign investment with tax and other guarantees.

Pinochet tried to remain in control of the nation of 15 million people, but Latin America was gravitating toward civilian rule. On Oct. 5, 1988, he lost a national referendum on a proposal to extend his rule until 1997. He was forced to call a presidential election, which was won by center-left coalition candidate Patricio Aylwin.

Pinochet handed over power to Aylwin in March 1990 but remained army commander for eight more years and then was a senator-for-life, a position guaranteed under the constitution written by his regime.

In 1998, Pinochet traveled to London to undergo back surgery, but was placed under house arrest after a Spanish judge issued a warrant seeking to try him for human rights violations. British authorities decided he was too ill to stand trial and sent him home in March 2000.

Back in Chile, ghosts of the past dogged the retired general. More than 200 criminal complaints were filed against him, one involving the Caravan of Death.

But on July 9, 2001, a court ruled that Pinochet could not face trial because of his poor physical and mental health after court-appointed doctors diagnosed him with a mild case of dementia. A 2004 case against Pinochet was also stopped because he was found unfit to stand trial.

Still, his opponents and relatives of his regime's victims kept trying to bring him to trial, successfully having him indicted and held under house arrest several times. But chances of any case reaching trial always appeared dim.

In 2004, a U.S. Senate investigative committee found Pinochet kept multimillion-dollar secret accounts at the Riggs Bank in Washington. In all, investigators said he had up to $17 million in foreign accounts, and Chilean courts charged Pinochet with owing $9.8 million in back taxes. He was also indicted on tax evasion charges, along with his wife and three children.

While many of his military and civilian followers supported him throughout his legal battle against human rights accusations, he was isolated and almost abandoned as the money dealings became public. Many expressed frustration and disappointment.

''We deserve an explanation for this,'' said retired Gen. Rafael Villarroel, once one of Pinochet's closest aides.

Since the mid-1990s, Pinochet led a mostly secluded life between his heavily guarded Santiago mansion and his countryside residence. He rarely appeared in public other than for checkups at the Santiago army hospital.

Associates said he lost interest in politics and rarely paid attention to news. During family gatherings he would remain mostly silent, looking frail and tired.

His health declined steadily. In 1992 he received a pacemaker. He suffered from diabetes and arthritis and had at least three mild strokes beginning in 1998.

He is survived by his wife, Lucia, who headed a volunteer women's organization dedicated to helping the poor, two sons and three daughters.