ABSTRACT
Microcredit promotes entrepreneurship, and puts each individual poor person, especially women, in the driving-seat in their own lives. The success of microcredit as a development tool derives from the fundamental assumption that the poor are no longer seen as passive victims but as capable and creative entrepreneurs who are able to take care of their own destiny. Drawing on field work done over the last ten years in rural Tamil Nadu, South India, this chapter focuses on the role of social institutions to explain why microcredit fails in promoting employment. Diversity in self-employment, most often located in individual or household characteristics, should rather be understood in terms of unequal relations in the larger political economy. With some exceptions, self-employed Dalits deals with the non-Dalit customers only when it comes to activities which are traditional caste based or in continuity and which are socially degrading and/or demanding physical work.
