At the bottom, 3 mn borrowers may have lost access to bank credit in 9 months
bottom-of-the-pyramid borrowers have lost access to formal financing over the past nine months after lenders stiffened conditions for advancing funds to these customers and wrote down sticky loans to clean up their books.
Industry experts said the number of such vulnerable borrowers could be even higher as lenders stopped financing customers with overdue loans of more than 60 days and those with an outstanding amount exceeding ₹3,000.
«The reduction in the number of borrowers is definitely due to the fact that defaulters are not being financed at present,» said Jiji Mammen, executive director at Sa-Dhan, a self-regulator for the microfinance sector.
«Our guardrails have also prescribed that the defaulters should not be financed.»
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Such customers are still counted among borrowers, and when the lenders write down such loans, official data would then show these borrowers losing access to institutional credit.
Quarterly data from Sa-Dhan showed that the number of unique borrowers catered to by universal banks, small finance banks, non-banking finance companies (NBFC), NBFC-MFIs and non-for-profit entities stood at 84 million at the end of December 2024. The number was at 87 million at the start of FY25.
The impact of worsening credit recovery is visible in the earnings of mainstream lenders. IndusInd Bank, currently in the midst of a crisis spawned by accounting discrepancies, saw its third-quarter net profit fall nearly 40% on accelerated provisioning for largely microfinance loans, which account for
