ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a semiotic approach to examine financial documents using a framework of inclusion/exclusion. It examines financial inclusion through its manifestation and expression in graphic forms and discursive structures. Inclusion can be described, measured, and explained when it occurs in an observable form, and when its effects are enacted. To apply reasoning based on inclusion is to invoke its corollary: exclusion. Exclusion is imbued with a negative value. Inclusion, therefore, draws individuals toward the center, cumulatively and positively; it seeks to tip the balance between inclusion and exclusion, in favor of the former; it draws attention to how access to the purported indicators of “included” status is granted or denied. The specific case of the consequences of the agrarian change process in rural India illustrates the limitations of the financial inclusion paradigm, which goes so far as to produce “‘adverse inclusion,’ i.e. incorporation into a cycle of indebtedness”.
