Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478014874)

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.

Author: Smitha Radhakrishnan
ISBN-10: 1478014873
ISBN-13: 9781478014874
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/28/2022
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.57d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2022