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Smitha Radhakrishnan is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and
Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. Radhakrishnan is the author of four books, most
recently Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke University Press, Alice
Amsden Book Prize Honorable Mention 2024) and The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (with
Cinzia D. Solari, Polity Press, Immanuel Wallerstein Book Prize Winner 2024). Her article
publications have appeared in leading feminist and development studies journals. She is
currently working on a large interview-based project on household debt in precarious
households with sites in India, South Africa and the US. Radhakrishnan is currently Chair of
the Global and Transnational Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.

This paper analyzes experiences of debt and precarity in the context of an intense focus on
financial inclusion policies in India. The first part of the paper draws from interviews with
150 working class men and women in urban Uttarakhand to demonstrate the prevalence of
exploitative, informal debt amid high levels of financial inclusion in the state. Almost half
our respondents reported never taking a loan from a formal financial institution, relying
instead on local moneylenders, loans from relatives, friends, or employers to manage
economic distress. The most common reported emergency loans were needed to meet
health emergencies, particularly around reproductive care, and carry an annual percentage
rate of interest that exceeds 200%. In the second part of the paper, we examine variations
along lines of caste, class, and gender among a subgroup of 37 interviewees who are all
primary earners in their households, earning similar wages doing janitorial and food service
work, and working for the same large employer. Leveraging a social reproduction
framework that focuses on physical and mental depletion over time, we uncover patterned
variations in experiences with debt corresponding with experiences of caste, class, and
gender oppression as well as interstate labor and marriage migration. We identify three
patterns of breadwinning among this subgroup: protected breadwinning, precarious
breadwinning, and depleted breadwinning. These findings pave the way for a sociological
approach to debt and indebtedness that accounts of differential access to institutions,
historical patterns of exclusion and residential segregation along lines of caste, and
differential expectations for paid and unpaid labor between men and women. We argue for
the utility of considering indebtedness as an axis of inequality similar to gender, class, and
caste and call for greater attention to the lived experiences of borrowing and debt to
address key questions of economy security in development policy, praxis, and research.

South Asia Seminar