THIS was meant to be the year when Indian microfinance came of age, thanks to the listing in August of SKS, the country's biggest microfinance institution (MFI). Optimists hoped that an infusion of private capital would spur even greater growth in credit to India's rural poor, nearly 27m of whom are already microfinance clients.
Two months and a messy collision with the realities of local politics later, Indian MFIs are reduced to talking about something more basic: survival. Politicians from the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP), where microfinance has made the deepest inroads and where SKS has its headquarters, have held microlenders responsible for the suicides of 57 people. It is alleged that they were hounded to their deaths by lenders' coercive recovery practices. MFIs deny wrongdoing. Vikram Akula, SKS's founder, says that although 17 of the 57 women who killed themselves were SKS clients, none was in default so there was “no scope for putting any pressure”.
Despite this, the state government passed an executive order on October 15th imposing curbs on MFIs. The order stopped short of capping interest rates, as many had feared, though a subsequent statement by a senior bureaucrat suggested that this remains an option. SKS has voluntarily shaved two percentage points off its loan rates in AP, where it has 2.2m borrowers. But it is barely functioning in the state anyway. A series of arrests of field workers has led the company to keep 6,000 staffers idle. It has made no collections in swathes of AP for three weeks.
Read more at http://www.economist.com/node/17420202#HYvBRJSi5FQCSLfI.99