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This piece is published in partnership with feminist newsroom Fuller. For more global feminist reporting, subscribe to Fuller’s newsletter.

Delhi/Nadia (West Bengal): On a late February evening this year, in a small village in West Bengal state, two loan collectors parked their motorcycle outside 36-year-old Sunita Das’s house and refused to leave until she paid an overdue weekly instalment Rs 2750 ($28). The problem was, she didn’t have the money to pay it.

The men were physically imposing. They shouted loudly enough for neighbours to hear and stayed for hours. Months later, the sound of a motorcycle still fills Das with fear.

“[For a long time] they refused to leave without the money,” Das says from her home in the village of Jamladanga Dighirpar, Nadia district. “When I could pay the instalments, there was no problem. But when I cannot, they speak to me very badly. They insult my children. They have no respect for a woman.” In the end, they left and she paid the instalment a few weeks later.

Das earns a living finishing handwoven sarees, unstable work that depends heavily on dry weather as rain prevents the dyed and starched fabric from drying properly. Hoping to supplement the family’s income, she and her husband borrowed Rs 300,000 ($3,150) from Bandhan Bank, a financial services company that provides microfinance and claims to empower women through small loans, to open a bicycle repair shop in 2024.

When the business failed due to low earnings, she borrowed Rs 215,000 ($2,230) a few months later in 2024 from Axis Bank’s microfinancing unit, to keep up with repayments. She now owes both lenders close to Rs 245,000 ($2,545).

“You can’t do any work when someone is sitting outside your door like that. I’m afraid when they come late at night. We worry that something bad might happen,” says Das, whose hands are stained yellow with the starch used to craft sarees.

Sunita Das stands outside her home in Nadia district, West Bengal, on June 19, 2026. Das says repeated visits by loan recovery agents after she fell behind on microfinance loan repayments have left her living in constant fear. Photograph: Qadri Inzamam

Why microfinance targets women

Her story is similar to that of tens of thousands of women across India who take on multiple microfinance loans to support their families and livelihoods but struggle to keep up with weekly or monthly repayments when their incomes fall short. When they default, many women report facing intimidation, harassment and pressure from loan recovery agents.

It has been nearly 50 years since Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus pioneered modern microfinance with the promise of helping poor women escape poverty through small, collateral-free loans. For decades, microfinance was celebrated by economists and institutions as an anti-poverty tool. The model spread rapidly across South Asia. Governments embraced it. International development organisations championed it.

India’s microfinance sector now serves about 55 million unique borrowers through 76 million active loans, with borrowers collectively owing lenders Rs 2.77 trillion ($29 billion) – 95% of them are women. As of 2025, women in India hold $800 billion in credit, nearly five times the amount recorded in 2017.

According to experts who spoke to Fuller, women like Das are deliberately targeted as borrowers, seen as more reliable, but also easier to pressure........

© The Wire