Narratives of risk and poor rural women’s (dis)-engagements with microcredit-based development in Eastern India

Abstract

Microcredit has come under severe academic criticism in recent years, but the diversity of local practices and discourses that respond to and critique microcredit is still underexamined. By exploring emergent entrepreneurial practices and strategic loan avoidance in Darjeeling, India, expressed locally in narratives of ''risk,'' this article emphasizes the counter-hegemonic aspects of local engagements with microcredit. We contend that women are neither passive victims of nor willing participants in microcredit. They selectively appropriate the global discourse of microcredit to formulate a skeptical subject position that criticizes the practice. Simultaneously, they contest microcredit's complicity with local patriarchies that exploit their labor and entrepreneurial activity. While critical of the indebtedness microcredit causes them, women value the entrepreneurial possibilities it opens up. We acknowledge the importance of the predominant Foucauldian-Marxist critiques of microcredit that posit it as another instance of ''accumulation through dispossession,'' but move beyond this view to focus on women's creative engagement with microcredit.

Women’s Collectives and State-Led Development in West Bengal: Reimagining Selves During Counterinsurgency

“…Kalpana (2017), in a recent book on women, SHGs and the state in Tamil Nadu has shown that 'women in SHGs valued opportunities to cultivate links to state actors for reasons that extended well beyond access to microfinance schemes and anti-poverty measures. Poor women creatively interpret and engage with state-led microfinance programmes that target them' (Sen & Majumder, 2015). Participation in SHGs brings them into contact with the state and they use the discourses of the state to forge new selves (Jakimow, 2014).…”

“…There is a consensus among scholars on this inadequacy. Nevertheless, there are unintended consequences of SHG mobilization for improving individual lives of women in the form of opening up 'spaces of manoeuvre' for engaging with the state (Kalpana, 2017), helping poor women exercise creative forms of agency (Sen & Majumder, 2015), and as I point out through Sumana's case study, a desire to improve everyday well-being.…”

Drivers and deterrents of entrepreneurial enterprise in the risk‐prone Global South

“…Small entrepreneurs often focus on subsistence over profit and therefore rely on a different set of “entrepreneurial possibilities” and tools to mitigate risks and “creatively engage” with economic development (cf. Sen and Majumder ). To build a complete picture of entrepreneurship in Guinea‐Bissau, we collected data from a diverse set of entrepreneurs both in size and business type to capture the full range of entrepreneurial possibilities (cf.…”

Women’s Collectives and Social Transformations in South Asia: Negotiations, Navigations and Self-making

“…They have attracted considerable scholarly attention, with some writing about their utter failure to improve women’s lives in rural India (Dutt & Samanta, 2006) or address poverty (Pattenden, 2010). Others point to how SHGs enable limited empowerment (Sud, 2013), and despite ‘discipling’ poor women, they do open possibilities for women’s creative agency to make collective claims on the state and redefine citizenship (Jakimow, 2014; Kalpana, 2017; Sen & Majumder, 2015; Spary, 2019). Beyond SHGs, development-centric collectives of women in India have also taken on hybrid forms, such as the part-state, part-NGO empowerment project known as Mahila Samakhya (MS).…”