Publication: Dvara Research

What would it take to foster a measurable increase in the availability of agriculture finance to small and medium farmers? 

On May 7th 2010, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University hosted the sixth annual Chicago Microfinance Conference.

The vertical take-off of the mobile services industry in India in the past few years has been aided by an aggressive pricing strategy adopted by both handset manufacturers and mobile service providers alike.

The Wealth Management Cross-Functional Team (comprising Amit Shah, Deepti George, Shilpa Sathe, Nitin Chaudhary, Suyash Rai, Bhaskar, Chandrachudan, Viji, Anil, Dave and Bindu)

After the successful completion of the first phase of our Chit Fund Research, Small Enterprise Finance Centre (SEFC) is entering into the second phase that involves 3 year long, rigorous, on-the-ground experiments.

IFMR Research’s Centre for Advanced Financial Studies (CAFS) has developed a portal that lets Financial Institutions compute their Value at Risk (VaR).

An article in The Hindu a few months back by P. Sainath stated that migrants from Ganjam staying in Surat send home Rs.400 crore a year.

Jim Rosenberg, Communications Officer for the CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poor)  Technology Program, recently interviewed Bindu about how the financial system in India might be configured to deliver complete financial service access.

Including the poor into the formal financial system has been hard despite numerous and sustained efforts. The difficulty in achieving inclusion attains a whole new meaning in hills and mountainous regions where populations are sparse and connectivity is extremely low.

Given the scope of Microfinance in India, it is imperative to measure access and impact of finance to understand its benefits and challenges.