Mediating Production, Re-powering Patriarchy: The Case of Micro Credit

The micro credit-based development programme working through self-help groups (SHGs) is an initiative whose basic premise is that the empowerment of women can be achieved through economically gainful activities. The lack of access to financial resources is considered to be one of the main reasons for the patriarchal subjection and subjugation of women as well as their low status in family and society. However, empowerment thus achieved or claimed to have been achieved through SHG initiatives may do more to enhancing the bargaining power of women within the existing system of male hegemony, thereby not only acknowledging but also strengthening it—the same unequal, hierarchical, masculine, biased system that SHGs are said to free women from. Using ethnographic field data undertaken in the city of Delhi, the present article examines some of the paradoxes in the practices of micro credit.