Imagine you’re a migrant laborer living entirely in the cash economy. How do you send money home to your wife and kids? How do you buy supplies from the next town over? How do you pay utility bills? In short, how do you move physical cash over distances? Without access to systems that permit transferring money conveniently, safely, and cheaply, hundreds of millions of domestic migrants face these dilemmas regularly. To better understand just how costly making remote payments can be for poor households, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned the Centre for Micro Finance at the Institute for Financial and Management Research (IFMR) and the Reserve Bank of India’s College for Agricultural Banking to survey 274 domestic Indian migrants and their families living at opposite ends of four domestic remittance corridors.
This is a guest blog by Justin Oliver & Dan Radcliffe. Justin is Executive Director of the Centre for Micro Finance in India and Dan is Program Officer with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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