Banking the Unbanked: Women and Microfinance in India

This article questions whether loans to women's income-generating collectives, individual microcredit loans, and other related lending programmes are necessary and sufficient to alleviate poverty. Taking as a case study a group of women in a drought prone region of Maharashtra in India, this article challenges the presumption that women's lives will change or improve merely by introducing microcredit without identifying underlying structural inequalities, such as, class, caste, race and gender. The discussion stresses that underlying deeply embedded social and cultural factors that mediate women's experience must be analysed and comprehended. I argue that any simplistic assumption that drawing women into a cycle of debt and repayment will improve their standard of living is based on unproblematized top-down view of people in the Global South. This article highlights the conflicts and contradictions of neoliberal market solutions for social problems; for example, whereas Indian women experience this introduction to banking and loans as coercive, CEOs call it standard practice. Thus, there remain irreconcilable differences between the corporate economic sector and the lived experiences of the poor. The best solutions, it is argued, are generated from the bottom, such as by consciousness raising, and not from the top.