Shantanu Nevrekar

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Banking on Community? Cooperative Banks and Markets of Financial Inclusion in Small Town India

While globally imagined as alternatives to mainstream financial markets, cooperative banks in India have emerged through collective efforts among caste groups aimed at community upliftment through participation in markets. Still embedded in caste-based community networks, cooperative banks in contemporary India compete in growing markets of financial inclusion to sell financial services to populations excluded from banking. Through an ethnographic study of two cooperative banks in a small-town financial market in India, Nevrekar’s research examines how they negotiate and utilize caste identities and relations, and how competing within markets of financial inclusion impacts and rearticulates existing community forms.

Shantanu Nevrekar, Department of Anthropology

Shantanu Nevrekar is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. Broadly interested in how economic ideas and practices negotiate and shape social identity and political subjectivity, Nevrekar’s research examines cooperative banks in small-town India, financial institutions that have become embedded in caste-based community networks, political party structures, and state bureaucracies. He explores the broad terrains of capital, debt, and culture within which these banks operate, investigating the social imaginaries of community and the kinds of markets and economic action that these enable. At Stanford, he is currently co-coordinator of the Stanford South Asia Working Group. He holds an MA in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and an MPhil in Sociology from the University of Delhi.

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