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Scaling-up Access to Finance for India’s Rural Poor
Shashank Shetty
Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research
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Synopsis
Despite the depth of the Indian financial system, and the country’s wide network of rural banks, India’s poor households, who are concentrated in rural areas, still have very little access to formal finance. A recent World Bank-NCAER Survey on rural access to finance (the Rural Finance Access Survey-RFAS, 2003) indicates that 70% of the rural poor do not have a bank account and 87% have no access to credit from a formal source. Informal sector lenders remain a strong presence in rural India, delivering finance to the poor: the RFAS, 2003 finds that 48% of landless and marginal farmers borrowed from an informal source at least once in the past 12 months, at rates averaging 48% per year.
But new approaches designed to deliver finance to the poor have emerged in India over the past decade, involving the provision of thrift, credit and other financial services and products of very small amounts, with the aim to raise income levels and improve living standards. Most notable among these microfinance approaches is a nationwide attempt, pioneered by non-governmental organizations, and now supported by the state, to create links between commercial banks, NGOs, and informal local groups (‘self-help groups’, or SHGs). Better known as ‘SHG Bank Linkage’, evidence suggests that the model has effectively targeted poorer segments of the rural population and helped reduce the vulnerability of its clients. The growth of SHG bank Linkage has been truly remarkable, particularly since the late 1990s. I ...