Bhaskar Sarkar (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Surplus insurance, or, India Stack and the antinomies of financial inclusion

This presentation emerges from a basic political economic concern: what effects will fintech apps and modalities, devised with the singular intent of monetizing every aspect of life and squeezing the last bit of pecuniary returns from it, have on other sectors of collective life, e.g. on education and health, or on justice, equality, and inclusivity? I focus on the IMF-backed move, a primary objective of the India Stack initiative, to bring the country's "unbanked" into the folds of the global financial order. This "financial inclusion" of currently unbanked adults—approximately 190 million in India, cumulatively 1.6 billion across the world—is expected to provide access to basic banking amenities and services such as mortgages, loans, and insurance. Contra this rhetoric of the democratization of opportunities, I underscore the sharp asymmetry between the newly "banked" poor’s potential financial windfalls (limited by the size of their savings/investments) during booms, and the considerable risk of ruination in the event of a financial crash (since they never have enough to diversify investment). I argue that the global gesture towards the financial inclusion of the most vulnerable underwrites a form of surplus insurance benefitting the richest investors.