Theme: Financial Lives of Poor Households

Financial inclusion is a key enabler of economic and social development. The effectiveness of the financial inclusion agenda in India can be significantly enhanced if there are objective ways to measure it.

I read an excellent post by Ajay Shah recently that questioned the policy wisdom of emphasising house ownership over rental housing.

For every loan of Rs, 10,000 made through a Public Sector Bank rural branch, it costs them about Rs. 4150. The same number for a Private Sector Bank rural branch is about Rs. 3210. Little wonder then that rural branch expansion meets with so much resistance.

The book is an edited compilation of articles that focus on using financial engineering a multidisciplinary field that uses technical methods from the fields of finance, mathematics and

What does the asset allocation look like for people living in remote rural India (villages with less than 5000 population)?

In India, rice and wheat comprise 70 percent of agricultural produce by area, but less than 25 percent by value.

There has been much discussion recently about the distorting nature of various indirect subsidies such as those being offered via price controls on fuel and fertiliser.

There has been a lot of stress on assessing a customer’s cash-flows before sanctioning a specific loan, for instance a home loan or a crop loan.

This is the first post in the Unemployment Support in India series. In this series, we will explore the unemployment support mechanisms in India today;

A recent report titled “Latest findings from Randomized Evaluations of microfinance” by Jonathan Bauchet, Cristoball Marshall, Laura Starita, Jeanette Thomas and Anna Yalouris, throws a lot of interesting insights into the realm of randomized evaluations and how they are being increasingly used by researchers across the globe to better understand financial services for the poor and the impacts achieved when an appropriate financial intervention is introduced.