Abstract
This paper examines the gendered local character of neoliberalism at the household level by focusing on microcredit/finance programs in India. Microfinance promoted by the state as an informal activity targeting women is intended to alleviate income inequalities, even as it contributes to maintaining the world capitalist system. In India the inception of microfinance-based Self Help Groups (SHGs) or peer groups of women savers and borrowers in the 1990s has coincided with a rightward turn towards neoliberal policies of structural adjustment, privatization and economic deregulation. In this paper, I show how Indian policy makers have endeavored to make women's economic entitlements contingent upon their disciplined financial behavior and their willing participation in neoliberal agendas of creating and deepening 'self-regulating' markets at village levels. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in a South Indian state, I show that the community level 'neoliberal disciplining' that microfinance entails does not proceed without resistance. Whilst SHGs seek to constitute women as fiscally disciplined savers and borrowers, women stake their 'rightful' entitlement to bank credit even as they reject outright the entrepreneurial subjectivities they are expected to assume. They pursue purposes and ends that extend well beyond 'financial inclusion.'
Highlights
The intertwining of neoliberal capitalism and development policymaking in the last two decades of the twentieth century and beyond is perhaps best exemplified by the case of microfinance/credit programs
Even as I draw upon theoretical debates that tease out the relationship between microfinance and capitalist accumulation (Aitken 2010; Karides 2010; Karim 2011; Mayoux 2002; Rankin 2001; Weber 2002), I situate these with respect to analytical literature on the Indian experience of neoliberal reforms (Chatterjee 2008; Corbridge et al 2011; Harriss 2011) and the Indian variant of the global microfinance phenomenon viz., Self Help Groups (SHGs) or villagelevel microfinance-centered peer groups
Of the paper, I draw on case studies from the state of Tamil Nadu that highlight the processes of negotiation between the women's SHGs, on the one hand, and bankers and the rural development bureaucracy, on the other, when the women stake claim to their economic entitlements
Summary
In India, SHG-based microfinance is currently the most visible and successful embodiment of the 'mainstreaming' of women within economic development and antipoverty programs. 2 In this paper, I show how women's participation in economic development projects is solicited, mobilized, and harnessed by policy makers as part of the social safety net of hou seholds in poverty during a period in which the Indian state has transited from a 'developmental' to an 'emergent capitalist' state (Vasavi and Kingfisher 2003). How SHG-based microfinance, as an emergent technology of neoliberal goverrnnentality, strives to shape and direct the "self-regulating capacities" and "self-steering mechanisms" (Miller and Rose 1990) of women of rural poor households so that they responsibly manage the financial resources they generate, 'choose' to adopt financial calculations, practices and identities in domains where these logics may not have been dominant earlier (Aitken 2010), and willingly bear the risks of collectively-managing micro-enterprise activities. Of the paper, I draw on case studies from the state of Tamil Nadu that highlight the processes of negotiation between the women's SHGs, on the one hand, and bankers and the rural development bureaucracy, on the other, when the women stake claim to their economic entitlements (via subsidy-bearing and non-subsidized loan schemes)
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