Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

This is the 2-page executive summary for the IMTFI Working Paper: Patterns of Financial Behavior Among Rural and Urban Microfinance Clients: Evidence from Tamil Nadu, India.

Over the past decade, development planners in India and beyond have increased their efforts at targetting financial inclusion as a means of poverty alleviation. However, the nature of poverty and deprivation, the livelihoods, and the financial needs of the poor vary widely across rural and urban India. The study by IMTFI researchers Lakshmi Kumar and Jyoti Prasad Mukhopadhay seeks to identify some key differences in the financial behavior of the rural and urban poor as an essential step towards designing more targeted financial tools. The study used financial diaries to collect data on income, consumption, savings, loans, and insurance from a sample of poor households over a period of six months.