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Making Women Pay Smitha Radhakrishnan

Making Women Pay By Smitha Radhakrishnan

Making Women Pay by Smitha Radhakrishnan


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Summary

Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, showing that despite the rhetoric about improving the everyday lives of women borrowers, the practice is a commercial industry that seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers.

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Making Women Pay Summary

Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India by Smitha Radhakrishnan

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.

Making Women Pay Reviews

Smitha Radhakrishnan's compelling and important study of women in the world of microfinance is one of the best books I've read in several years. No other book on the market features this kind of data, access, or methods of triangulation. With its clear writing, rich stories and nuance, Making Women Pay will challenge readers to think more critically about how microfinance is deeply gendered. Engaging, moving, and powerful. -- Kimberly Kay Hoang, author of * Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work *
While the scholarship on microfinance has become increasingly nuanced over the past three decades, we still lack critical information about the very people who put microfinance into practice-namely, the loan officers, educators, and field-workers who directly interface with clients and act as brokers between clients and administration, as well as upper-level administrators. Smitha Radhakrishnan fills this critical gap, offering readers a new analysis of microfinance that takes seriously microfinance workers at all levels as social agents. Reading this book is a breath of fresh air and a true delight. -- Erin Beck, author of * How Development Projects Persist: Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs *

About Smitha Radhakrishnan

Smitha Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology and Luella LaMer Slaner Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College and author of Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations and Acronyms ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. The Invisible State of Gender and Credit 25
2. Men and Women of the MFI 47
3. Making Women Creditworthy 70
4. Social Work 100
5. Empowerment, Declined 124
6. Distortions of Distance 148
7. Impact Revisited 177
Conclusion 197
Methodological Appendix 211
Notes 219
Bibliography 233
Index 245

Additional information

CIN1478014873G
9781478014874
1478014873
Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India by Smitha Radhakrishnan
Used - Good
Paperback
Duke University Press
2022-02-18
272
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Making Women Pay