Browsing Tag: Loans

According to the survey, 85% farmers (including both in the marginal as well as the large category) are under debt.

SKS was once seen as a model for how microcredit firms could do very well for themselves by making loans as small as $50 to basket weavers and other poor people. Now the company, which last week reported its first loss as a public company, seems to symbolize the problems of microfinance in India.

An army of workers, their faces encrusted with dust, toils beside a story-high pile of unfired bricks. They are helping build a new India that appears to be leaving them behind. From sunup to sundown they spend their time pouring wet mud into molds, lugging them to the kiln, firing them and then pulling them out. For their backbreaking work, they do not receive any wages.

One of India’s leading social workers, Ela Bhatt, who heads the Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, said micro-finance firms had lost sight of the fact that the poor needed more than loans to be successful entrepreneurs. They need business and financial advice as well, she said.