Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

 Suicide Epidemic

The years 2016/2017 record the beginning of a rising wave of suicides of women, in some cases the entire families along with small children. Similar to an earlier wave of suicides among farmers in the 90s, suicides of women were associated with debt, to be specific, with microfinance loans. It was equivalent to the suicide epidemic in the Andhra Pradesh in early 2010. Women victimised by microfinance in the North, East and North-Central provinces in Sri Lanka with the support of co-operatives and women’s groups, started protesting against usurious lending practices by microfinance institutions and harassment – verbal and sexual, that women undergo at the hands of loan collection officers. Unlike in the case of Andhra Pradesh which overhauled the microfinance market, the suicides in Sri Lanka have only received nominal attention. Apart from a partial debt waiver and an interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. rate cap (as high as 35%), demands of the microfinance victims have gone unnoticed and reduced to election promises. Microfinance companies, on the other hand, have strengthened their foothold and maintain that protests are engineered by a group of people with ulterior motives to tarnish the image of MFI, as sources of poverty alleviation.

The suicide of *Kumari along with her child takes place in this context. The Department of Police records that economic hardships, poverty and indebtedness are a regular cause for suicides in Sri Lanka. According to the police department’s statistics, around 200 or more suicides annually associated with economic hardships, poverty and debt have become a recurrent phenomenon. This evidence surpasses the numbers that microfinance victims have been quoting. It is just the tip of the iceberg.

 The Microfinance landscape in Sri Lanka

Irrespective of the surge of complaints and protests, the microfinance industry continues to be seen as a “helpful” financial mechanism to the poor. Multilateral and bilateral donors express more concern in the financial sustenance of the microfinance market than the predicament of indebted low-income men and women who are facing economic fallout and loss of income. The leading politicians from the Government who ran elections on the promise of cancelling all microfinance debt argue that private sector financial markets should be protected. The mood in politics and policy was revealed when the Lanka Microfinance Practitioners’ Association hosted a Zoom meeting with the State Minister of Samurdhi, Household Economy, Micro Finance, Self-Employment and Business Development Shehan Semasinghe, and the Central Bank Central Bank The establishment which in a given State is in charge of issuing bank notes and controlling the volume of currency and credit. In France, it is the Banque de France which assumes this role under the auspices of the European Central Bank (see ECB) while in the UK it is the Bank of England.

ECB : http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/home.aspx , to restore the image of MFIs and demand cheap bulk funds. According to their narrative, only a handful of lenders engage in dangerous lending, and the biggest problem is with reckless borrowers who have borrowed from multiple companies and haven’t used borrowed credit for entrepreneurial purposes. The industry at large is not to be blamed as they serve a productive function to the Sri Lankan people.

However, the everyday experiences of microfinance borrowers, combined with empirical studies on the microfinance industry in Sri Lanka, narrate a different story. The promotion of the commercialisation of microlending to encourage ’innovations’ and attract foreign capital in the 2000s have had a transformative effect on the traditional microlenders like co-operatives and community-based organisations. For example, a report by ADB in 2002 titled "Commercialization of Microfinance: Sri Lanka’’, actively criticises the proactive role of the government in providing subsidised credit. According to ADB, state-driven subsidised credit and welfare-oriented credit provided by co-operatives and community-based organisations, impede the growth of the microfinance industry and enhance its productivity through commercialisation. The report is prescriptive in the manner in which the approach of the government and the Central Bank should change to allocate space for pro-profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. lenders in the private sector. The ideological push towards pro-profit lending, in combination with the incursion of foreign capital in line with disaster capitalism in the aftermath of the Tsunami in 2004 and the end of the war in 2009, exploded the microfinance market in Sri Lanka. For example, the microfinance market expanded from 200 MFIs in the early 2000s, to 14,000, by 2015. Lending became a profitable business. The multiplication of lending institutes in the formal and semi-formal sectors led to multiple borrowing. Another study indicates a high density of microlenders in a GS division as a cause for multiple borrowing. My fieldwork in Polonnaruwa, Welioya (Manalaaru), Gampola and Nawalapitiya, indicates that 57% of people from a sample of 813 people facing difficulties to pay back their debt, had more than 3 loans. I documented 21 finance companies and 19 Microfinance Institutes in five Divisional Secretariats in Polonnaruwa, lending to low-income households apart from Samurdhi, co-operatives, Grameeya and Rural-Development Banks. The transformation of welfarism to debtfarism – forcing the poor to rely on private and costly finance to support social reproduction, under the influence of ADB-like thinking, led the government to gradually withdraw from its social welfare functions. According to people in debt, the main cause of their indebtedness is disinvestments on co-operatives and state-sponsored credit-schemes, as well as the pro-profit shift in community-based organisations.

As much as lending has become a profitable business during the last 20 years, finance companies from the formal sector have had an advantage over commercialisation. Women’s groups engaged in micro-lending in Hambanthota complained that big finance companies are to be blamed for the suicide epidemic and the rural debt crisis. Access to a vast range of foreign capital from multilateral and bilateral donors, venture capital, investment banks, pension funds Pension Fund
Pension Funds Pension funds: investment funds that manage capitalized retirement schemes, they are funded by the employees of one or several companies paying-into the scheme which, often, is also partially funded by the employers. The objective is to pay the pensions of the employees that take part in the scheme. They manage very big amounts of money that are usually invested on the stock markets or financial markets. as well as asset Asset Something belonging to an individual or a business that has value or the power to earn money (FT). The opposite of assets are liabilities, that is the part of the balance sheet reflecting a company’s resources (the capital contributed by the partners, provisions for contingencies and charges, as well as the outstanding debts). -backed securitisation, has boosted the lending capacity of the big financiers and has enabled them to leverage Leverage This is the ratio between funds borrowed for investment and the personal funds or equity that backs them up. A company may have borrowed much more than its capitalized value, in which case it is said to be ’highly leveraged’. The more highly a company is leveraged, the higher the risk associated with lending to the company; but higher also are the possible profits that it may realise as compared with its own value. against community-based organisations engaged in microfinance business. Despite access to cheap credit, micro financiers provide the costliest debt in Sri Lanka, even at the regulated interest of 35%. Even though loan rates of the finance and banking sector have drastically gone down in the face of the Covid-19 induced economic disaster, MFIs have not reduced their rates. Apart from the explosion in the lending market, sourcing capital through ’innovative ways’ such as asset-backed securitisation, also increases the pressure on borrowing companies to increase lending. Performance targets given to loan officers to issue loans and inducing borrowers to upgrade to higher-value loans are an expression of these practices. Stringent loan conditions which offer little to no space to negotiate or restructure loan agreements, push borrowers against the wall, with human and institutional violence forcing them to comply with debt payments. The fear of financial disenfranchisement which would deny people’s access to formal credit holds the indebted hostage to microfinance companies. The violence inherent to the microlending mechanism has made poor women the most credible borrowers.

The suicide epidemic as well as the concrete evidence for multiple borrowing indicates that the microfinance market in Sri Lanka is exceeding the saturation point. Addressing problems of an overcrowded market that predates on economically vulnerable groups, demands more than a Credit Regulatory Act, and financial literacy that the Government, Central Bank and the Lanka Microfinance Practitioners’ Association advocate for. A recent action by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Cambodia, illustrates a case in point. In the face of debt-driven land grabs, harassments and rights abuses related to microfinance lending, HRW demanded clarification from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank World Bank
WB The World Bank was founded as part of the new international monetary system set up at Bretton Woods in 1944. Its capital is provided by member states’ contributions and loans on the international money markets. It financed public and private projects in Third World and East European countries.

It consists of several closely associated institutions, among which :

1. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, 189 members in 2017), which provides loans in productive sectors such as farming or energy ;

2. The International Development Association (IDA, 159 members in 1997), which provides less advanced countries with long-term loans (35-40 years) at very low interest (1%) ;

3. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), which provides both loan and equity finance for business ventures in developing countries.

As Third World Debt gets worse, the World Bank (along with the IMF) tends to adopt a macro-economic perspective. For instance, it enforces adjustment policies that are intended to balance heavily indebted countries’ payments. The World Bank advises those countries that have to undergo the IMF’s therapy on such matters as how to reduce budget deficits, round up savings, enduce foreign investors to settle within their borders, or free prices and exchange rates.

on their practice of continuing to lend to an abusive industry.

 A Way Out

People who have fallen prey to the profiteering practices of the microfinance industry have for years now been exposing systemic issues in the microfinance industry, as well as structural issues in the Sri Lankan economy. However, politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists more attuned to the requests of the industry have turned a blind eye. Instead of addressing the concerns of the people, the government has been proactively transforming social security mechanisms in a way that it nurtures the private debt market. The State-Business nexus has replaced the social contract between the State and the people.

Percentage Share Share A unit of ownership interest in a corporation or financial asset, representing one part of the total capital stock. Its owner (a shareholder) is entitled to receive an equal distribution of any profits distributed (a dividend) and to attend shareholder meetings. of Gross Value Added (GVA) by Institutional Sectors in 2019 (at Current Market Prices)

According to Central Bank statistics, the micro, small and medium sectors in the economy accounts for the bulk of value addition to the Sri Lankan economy. The CBSL Annual Report 2019, documents that household and non-profit institutions serving households account for 48.8% of the Gross Value Addition. Their contribution exceeds value addition by the government, non-finance and finance sectors to the economy combined. Working women and men from low-income backgrounds play the most crucial role in terms of injecting the economy with remittance and foreign currency. Sri Lanka is a smallholder economy in which women perform a major role. However, disbursement of unpayable debt and other socio-economic indicators show that these economically productive people are marginalised when it comes to the distribution of wealth. According to a UN study which calculates household income based on the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2016, 74% of the population has been living on only Rs. 613/= per day before the Covid-19 crisis. The HIES 2016 itself, indicates an acute mismatch between household income and expenditure for the poorest 50% of the population. Women explaining the everyday struggle with debt say, “we forego meals to pay our debt”.

Poor women and men work hard to keep the economy rolling forward. Yet, their hard work takes place in a highly unequal economic system. It is a system that has been systematically dispossessing their meagre assets and wealth. The commercialisation of agriculture under the guidance of the World Bank has destroyed the autonomy of smallholders. Capital intensive agriculture running parallel to the withdrawal of state investments has created a private sector monopoly in producing seeds, providing fertilizer, chemicals, equipment and machinery. A few companies, some of them part of finance-led conglomerates, dominate the production chain. This situation is replicated in the supply chain as well. Instead of creating equitable growth, private sector monopolies in agricultural inputs, technology and credit have laid the foundation to the development of underdevelopment for the smallholders. Indebtedness and poverty are built into the system despite their hard work. The way out is by breaking the vicious cycle. Active state intervention through investments in agriculture should be made to eliminate private monopolies and democratise production and supply chains. Seed autonomy, guaranteed prices, proper irrigation facilities, storage facilities, and assistance with market access, is mandatory to facilitate the way out. Strengthening credit and producer co-operatives along with other community-owned credit mechanisms should accompany the agrarian reinvigoration policy. This is a long-time demand that people in debt have been making.

Structural inequalities will not go away with half-hearted interventions. Living wages, decent housing, strong workplace-based rights, coupled with public education and healthcare will democratise the economy and enhance people’s capabilities. These will help people overcome the precarious conditions in which they are living. Politicians, as well as the business class who want to bring about a qualitative transformation in the Sri Lankan economy, must question why the plantation workers who have been working in the plantations for over 200 years cannot have a living wage, decent housing and a land of their own. What kind of economic development could be made possible, when a substantial portion of the working population is kept in debt bondage? Debt has long been stifling the development potential of the working people. And above all, it has proven anti-people, and particularly dangerous for women. The informalisation of the economy, accompanied by State-sanctioned entrepreneurial projects has trapped women into participating in low-waged, unprotected and vulnerable economic activity. A recent report by Oxfam points out that women in South Asia have faced the highest unemployment rates at 20.4%, due to Covid-19 disruptions. It also states that the poor will take more than a decade to recover from the damages.

In light of this, debt cancellation is fundamental to an inclusive development policy. People in debt argue that they have already paid back in full, the debt they borrowed. Punitive lending oriented towards the enrichment of finance companies should be held accountable for the household debt crisis. A debt audit would expose the degree of excessive extraction microfinance and finance companies are engaged in. Dumping new loans on top of a pile of old debt will not lead to meaningful investments. New Samurdhi Enterprise Development Loan Schemes which proposes to lend loans of up to rupees one and two million, at a 7% interest rate, looms negatively, as it can end up transferring people’s savings to finance companies as debt repayments, instead of making a meaningful impact on development. It could end up further weakening the Samurdhi social security programme.

Everyone aspiring for real development in Sri Lanka should join hands with the victims of microfinance, and others from the middle class, to rally against predatory lending practices such as leasing, hire-purchase and housing loans. An examination of the Top 30 Businesses in Sri Lanka, over two decades, demonstrates how the economy has been skewing towards the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors, by concentrating wealth in the hands of financiers. Acquisitions and major expansions by some leading finance companies, over the last couple of years, explains how the productive industrial economic sector has become subordinate to the banking and finance sectors.

An assessment of these proposals would prove to be more people-friendly, cost-effective and sustainable than expensive financial inclusion measures hyped up by the World Bank, ADB and pro-finance lobbyists. Women saying NO to microfinance have been tabling these proposals. Grappling with debt in their everyday life, they have been imagining and developing the alternatives that would liberate them from debtfarism and perpetual dependency that is pushed upon them. It is high time that the government listen to them.