Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the gendered links between debt and social reproduction in India by showcasing how debt is managed by the unpaid and underpaid labor provided by women, children and female kin. This unpaid labor to manage debt and SR, we show depletes women physically, financially and mentally.

Paper long abstract:

Existing work on rising debt and credit borrowing in the Global North illustrates the myriad ways global processes of financialization and privatization of social reproduction have increasingly pulled poor and racially marginalized women into the circuits of global finance. Our paper explores the gendered links between debt and social reproduction in India, where neoliberal forms of capitalist transformation have engendered a crisis of social reproduction, and differential forms of credit borrowing and debt has become an everyday mode of living, especially for the precariously laboring. By drawing from semi-structured interviews conducted with precariously laboring households across diverse rural-urban regions in two states in India, Uttar Pradesh and Goa, we show how credit and debt is deeply interwoven in sustaining basic needs of everyday life (making families food secure, and meeting vital expenses related to education, housing, health care, marriage), but at the same time how it repletes value and constrains social reproduction of certain lives; especially women and female kins, whose (un)paid and underpaid self exploitative forms of affective and emotional labor helps families accumulate credit, manage household debt and finance amidst food insecurity and other forms of livelihood precarity.