Article
Informal Tenancy and Financial Inclusion among Tenant Farmers: Institutional Credit Access and Digital Finance Adoption in Coimbatore District
This paper investigates the role of informal tenancy as a barrier to financial inclusion among the landless cultivators of India. Based on a structured survey of 150 tenant farmers from Coimbatore District, Tamil Nadu it was found that 80 percent of the tenants were working under informal arrangement. The main cause for informality is found to be an absence of documentary proof. It was found that credit flows are dominated by cooperative and commercial banks although some informal lending also exists. On the other hand, there has been tremendous uptake of digital technologies including use of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and ATM card but digital literacy remains at a moderate level. Financial Inclusion scores stand at a moderate level. The analysis reveals significant positive relationship between the degree of formality in rental agreement (as measured by chi-square statistic χ2=16.82, df=8, p=0.032) and financial inclusion (positive Spearman correlation r=0.28, p<0.01). Therefore, the paper suggests enhancing the documentation process for better tenancies and investing in targeted digital literacy programs to ensure broader participation in financial services.