-Ideas for India The share of bank credit extended to MSMEs increased dramatically during the pandemic. In this post, Harsh Vardhan discusses the the government guarantee of bank loans as a possible driver of this growth. He outlines the current policy of providing credit against collateral, and the constraints MSMEs face while borrowing– which leads to decreased investment and firm productivity. He argues that the learnings from the credit guarantee scheme...

The term “bottom of the pyramid” (BOP), coined by the late C K Prahalad, became wildly attractive in the early noughties, in part because the concept, which suggests that it is possible and legit to make money from the poor, provided a leavening justification for the animal spirits of capitalism in poor countries like India and China with their growing list of Forbes billionaires. On the verge of the second decade...