Making Women Pay

Making Women Pay Microfinance in Urban India

Hardback (28 Jan 2022)

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Publisher's Synopsis

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.

Book information

ISBN: 9781478013938
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Imprint: Duke University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 332.0954
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 272
Weight: 522g
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Spine width: 16mm