According to a report by the Microfinance Institutions Network, almost 99% of clients â the borrowers â are women. This is done under the guise of womenâs âempowermentâ and âincreasing access to creditâ. Yet it is consistently evident across conversations with the women borrowers that the men of these households are the decision-makers regarding how the borrowed money would be spent.
In reality, women also have far fewer resources to âabscondâ from their localities, unlike their male counterparts, and are also stereotypically considered more responsible, honest and âvirtuousâ.
According to the Time-use Survey, 2024, females spent 16.4% of their time on unpaid domestic work, compared to 1.7% for males. This means that recovery agents are far more likely to find them at home when they make their collection rounds. Women are also more visible to their neighbours, who notice these visits of recovery agents, making them more vulnerable to social ostracism.
This has been widely noted in the literature as the âeconomy of shameâ that uses social norms to control the flow of money. This results in debt traps for people who are borrowing to survive, particularly women.
The âpay for votesâ â or cash doles on offer for women â as electoral sops, as witnessed in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal and more recently in Bihar and Kerala â have their background in acute cash scarcity that women confront as they try to secure their own lives and that of their dependents. Some states have come up with programmes to relieve some of this distress, like Keralaâs Kudumbashree, a women-led cooperative network.
But in most other states, women confront only microfinance companies and their business logic, which leaves them deeply trapped in debt cycles that are often impossible to escape.
