This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Annotation This book examines the current level and pattern of access to finance for India's rural households, evaluates various approaches for delivering financial services, analyzes what lies behind the lack of adequate financial access, and identifies what it would take to improve access to finance.

Looking to examples in Thailand and Bangladesh, this book enumerates the various factors which have been instrumental in weakening the rural credit agencies set up to relieve rural poverty in developing countries.

Beyond Micro-Credit sets out how Indian Micro-Finance Initiatives are combining micro-finance with a wide range of development goals, these include not only poverty alleviation through providing savings, credit and insurance services but also promoting livelihoods, empowering women, building people's organizations and changing institutions.

Credit cooperatives in India make up one of the largest rural financial systems in the world. Playing a vital role in dispensing credit in largely agricultural areas, they are also the weakest link in the formal credit delivery system. This book provides a valuable case study of the traditional banking system in this developing economy, exploring the reasons for the poor performance of credit cooperatives in India and suggesting measures to revitalise them. Although this sector has grown along with the micro-credit sector to provide finance for the poor and the less creditworthy borrowers, financing development still remains a major problem in the developing world. However, the financial health of credit cooperatives in India has been a matter of perennial concern. The author argues that cooperatives hold great promise for financial inclusion if the financial position of the cooperatives can be consolidated. Providing a detailed analysis of the historical evolution of cooperatives in India, the book establishes the link between different segments of this institutional system and their performance in a commercial sense to show that cooperatives occupy an important place in India’s financial edifice as they play a key role in the multi-agency framework for rural credit delivery. As such, the analysis provides a valuable reference for scholars of economics, Asian economics and finance.