Upward Mobility, Class Formation, and Development Practice: Everyday Contradictions of Microfinance Work in Urban India

• In Event: 299 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Paper Session. Mobility in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Since the mid-2000s, India’s for-profit microfinance industry has enjoyed a dramatic expansion. Comprised of hundreds of microfinance institutions (MFIs) throughout the country, the industry offers opportunities for stable, well-paid, upwardly mobile jobs to working or lower-middle class Indians with regional language abilities and modest educational qualifications. While most research on microfinance focuses on borrowers, this paper focuses on MFI workers’ interactions with borrowers and their career trajectories to argue that MFI work itself mobilizes processes of class distinction. Drawing on recent fieldwork and interviews in two Indian MFIs, this paper shows that MFI fieldworkers enter the industry with a working-class or lower middle-class habitus similar to the clients they serve with loans and other financial products, but the interactions surrounding the loan exchange engender everyday work of both identification and distinction. These simultaneous processes build marketable skills for employees, while also drawing clear boundaries between the fieldworker and the borrower. The fieldworker—usually a loan officer who is a man—is legitimated by his connections to an established financial institution, and his ability to control access to the cash loans that comprise a critical part of many working class households. The client, on the other hand—almost always a working class woman—must rely upon the services of one or more fieldworkers to continue to receive those loans. Over time, the everyday work of microfinance creates financial stability and upward mobility for the loan officer, while outcomes for borrowers remain precarious.

Author

• Smitha Radhakrishnan, Wellesley College