NCAER Report Release: Present and Potential Contribution of Microfinance to India’s Economy

NCAER and Microfinance Institutions Network (MFIN) released a report titled Present and Potential Contribution of Microfinance to India’s Economy. The report was released by Dr Rajiv Kumar, Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog in a virtual event.

In this livecast session, Dr Poonam Gupta, Director General, NCAER gave a background to this study while Dr Shashanka Bhide, Senior Advisor, NCAER presented the key findings of the report. Dr Alok Misra, CEO & Director, MFIN, Mr. Devesh Sachdev, Chairperson MFIN, MD & CEO, Fusion Micro Finance Ltd and Mr. Vivek Tiwari, Vice Chairperson MFIN, MD ,CEO & Chief Information Officer(CIO), Satya MicroCapital Ltd also spoke the event.

The fact that the microfinance sector enjoys a vast reach among crores of borrowers also gives rise to certain corollary questions: What is the scale of the economic impact of microfinance operations at the national level? How are the microfinance sector and overall economic growth related? It is with a view to explore these questions that the Micro Finance Institutions Network (MFIN), an association of NBFC-MFIs, approached NCAER to carry out such a study. This study by NCAER provides an assessment of the impact of microfinance on the macro economy, focusing on the activities of Nonbanking Finance Companies (NBFC-MFIs). This focus provides a better understanding of the channels of the impact of microfinance on jobs and income. The impact on GDP and jobs has been extrapolated to the entire microfinance sector to arrive at a broader assessment of the sector as a whole.

The NCAER study team was led by Shashanka Bhide. The team members included Senior Adviser, Devendra B. Gupta, Bornali Bhandari, Sanjukta Das, Madhura Dasgupta, Samarth Gupta, Devender Pratap, Ajaya Sahu, Jaskirat Singh Kohli, and Ruchi Avtar.