The objective of this paper is to draw attention to those aspects of the lives of Low-Income Households (LIHs) that aren’t related to their income. In doing so, the paper characterises LIHs from a social capital perspective, highlighting the maintenance and strengthening of social capital as a deep-rooted cultural trait that is central to meaning-making in the lives of LIHs. We use a heuristics-based approach to nuance the differences between LIHs versus non-LIHs based on different sources of social capital that households possess. We operationalise the heuristic in the context of measuring the social capital of Indian households using primary datasets from two diverse contexts. The paper concludes by applying the learnings to the domain of financial inclusion policy and practice.
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