Making Women Pay

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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. Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, showing that despite the rhetoric about improving the everyday lives of women borrowers, the practice is a commercial industry that seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers. Smitha Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology and Luella LaMer Slaner Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College and author of Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class, also published by Duke University Press. 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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