Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into financial networks at the global peripheries. As “proxy‐creditors,” loan officers in Kolkata, India, must produce and alienate debt relationships to create loan products. I argue that the process of financialization is articulated through local idioms of moneylending, care, and respect. Moreover, at the heart of this labor is the unresolved tension between capitalist expansion and ethical concerns for the everyday relationships that are used to extend credit to the financially excluded.

With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded into circuits of global finance. In making these collateral‐free loans, however, microfinance institutions (MFIs) engage in new forms of risk management. While loans are made to women with the goal of economic and social empowerment, MFIs require male kin to serve as guarantors. Drawing on fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, I argue that through the requirement of male guarantors, MFIs hedge on kinship, even as they speculate on the bottom of the pyramid as a new market of accumulation.

No abstract

With the launch of the new financial inclusion programme in 2015, the government of India claimed that more than 90 per cent of households now have access to bank accounts. The programme sought not only to link the poor in India to financial services such as credit and savings, but also to insurance‐based welfare payments. This article examines how the expansion of welfare programmes – a seeming alternative to austerity – in India has simultaneously hinged on arguments of fiscal conservatism. In other words, financial inclusion has also served to curtail government expenditure through payment systems and financial infrastructures. However, as the poor are drawn into new financial products, it raises the question of ‘who benefits’ when welfare systems are streamlined through the banking system.

No abstract