Tag: Financial Lives of Poor Households

In this blog, we will highlight some interesting facts about agricultural households from the survey through a set of questions that can help contextualise the financial lives of farmers and their families.

This blog presents key insights from the second round of the survey report, NAFIS 2021-22, and finds that the rural households’ investment portfolio continues to be dominated by physical assets, which is in contrast with the predominance of formal debt on the liabilities side of the household balance sheets.

According to a report by Crif High Mark, microfinance loans overdue for up to 31-180 days increased from 2.1% in March 2024 to 2.7% in June 2024. While there could be several supply-side factors at play for the rise in defaults, in this blog we direct our attention to reviewing the household side of the story by assessing the changes in household balance sheets post the COVID-19 pandemic.

The objective of this policy brief is to summarise learnings from fieldwork conducted in Rajasthan and Gujarat towards (i) building evidence on the customer protection issues in the sale and servicing of the two insurance schemes and (ii) bringing to the forefront the structural issues on the supply-side that are holding back Financial Service Providers (FSPs) from offering high-quality service in the context of these two schemes.

The objective of this deck is to summarise learnings from fieldwork conducted in Rajasthan and Gujarat towards (i) building evidence on the customer protection issues in the sale and servicing of the two insurance schemes and (ii) bringing to the forefront the structural issues on the supply-side that are holding back Financial Service Providers (FSPs) from offering high-quality service in the context of these two schemes

How can finance be designed and structured for agriculture, farmers, agricultural households, agrarian communities and the larger economy so as to ensure economic equity, social well-being, and environmental sustainability?

This paper aims to document the unique characteristics of the financial lives of low-income households in India. It focuses on the intra-year fluctuations in income that are faced by these households owing to the precarity of their occupations.

For two decades, India has doubled down on the policy prescription of providing financial ‘last-mile access’ to its rural and poor citizens. Has the effort succeeded? It depends on who you ask.

The paper starts by revisiting existing literature on the financial lives of LIHs that shows that they manage their finances in a rather sophisticated manner. This can be traced to the radical uncertainty they face, which includes a “triple whammy” of income problems and expenditure shocks that are frequent and unique to their circumstances.

In this note, we discuss how the difficulty of selling life insurance led to bundling insurance with savings2, how such bundling can be sub-optimal, and why such products are popular despite adverse customer experiences. We then make a case for providing relevant, complete, and comparable information that can aid suitable product decisions, sale, and persistence. We also offer a template for what such a Customer Information Sheet could look like.