Image Source: PTI In this general election, many candidates are banking on votes based on the performance of poverty reduction and social security schemes. India has a plethora of such schemes, and the government has invested billions of rupees in … Read More

Photocredit: Quirky Kid Social exclusion has been defined as ‘the process through which individuals or groups are wholly or partially excluded from full participation in the society within which they live’.  Gender, caste or ethnic disadvantage translates into social exclusion … Read More

Although this view is rapidly changing, qualitative research sometimes carries a reputation of being a less reliable or trustworthy approach than say, econometrics. More often than not, this stems from a belief that qualitative research is fundamentally subjective and therefore … Read More

After the Andhra Pradesh crisis in 2010 hit, the extensive media coverage on predatory lending practices, coercive collection methods and resulting farmer suicides due to over indebtedness etched itself in public memory. Microfinance had promised the upliftment of the poor … Read More

There is revived interest in the role of informal credit in India, with researchers using a variety of innovative tools to study informal products and their delivery channels. While the majority of informal loans may come from professional moneylenders, such lenders are … Read More

Overview:  With the large existing pool of SHGs and the expected growth, it is imperative that the role of SHGs is extended beyond (indirect) credit linkage, and strategies are developed to optimize their potential in enabling comprehensive financial inclusion of … Read More

Overview: This session wil attempt to build a vision for financial inclusion in India, identify policy bottlenecks, strategies for convergence and incubation of innovations for sustained and durable outcomes towards mainstreaming the poor into formal financial systems. Moderator – N Srinivasan, Sector … Read More

For many of India’s 850 million rural inhabitants, 40 per cent of whom live in poverty, delivering agricultural output in a timely manner is a significant challenge. Poor infrastructure, lack of scale  economies (70 per cent of landholdings are less … Read More

The Centre for Micro Finance recently created a database of welfare schemes that have been launched by the Government of India; the database also has state and sector wise information for easier information retrieval. While working on the database, I … Read More