The Antinomies of 'Financial Inclusion': Debt, Distress and the Workings of Indian Microfinance

The concept of ‘financial inclusion’ has become a central trope that legitimates a wide range of contemporary development practices. By constructing a new object of development – the ‘financially excluded’ – it facilitates the expansion of an increasingly corporatized microfinance technocracy. The present paper problematizes the underlying binaries of inclusion/exclusion and formal/informal finance upon which this narrative is based. Through an examination of the 2010 Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis, it demonstrates key contradictions within the discourse and practices of commercial microfinance. In so doing, it demonstrates why the narrative of financial inclusion and its correlate notion of ‘consumption smoothing’ are inadequate tools with which to conceptualize the political economy of contemporary agrarian change.