Making women pay : microfinance in urban India

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Making women pay : microfinance in urban India

Smitha Radhakrishnan

Duke University Press, 2022

  • : pbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-243) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In Making Women Pay, Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations and Acronyms ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. The Invisible State of Gender and Credit 25 2. Men and Women of the MFI 47 3. Making Women Creditworthy 70 4. Social Work 100 5. Empowerment, Declined 124 6. Distortions of Distance 148 7. Impact Revisited 177 Conclusion 197 Methodological Appendix 211 Notes 219 Bibliography 233 Index 245

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