Digitalisation of Informal Credit in Mumbai Slums during COVID-19

Slum dwellers of Mumbai, India are engaged in informal markets for their livelihoods and access to resources such as credit and raw materials. Most of them depend heavily on the informal credit markets such as Informal Money Lenders, Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, Self-Help Groups, etc. Some also resort to the formal credit and semi-formal credit markets such as Microfinance Institutions. During COVID-19 pandemic, many of them started accessing digital finance, and post second wave, in almost all the slums in Mumbai, unified payment interface-based payments systems such as G-Pay and Paytm became very popular for managing financial resources and transfers. Digital finance connects them to the global financial market and they became the part of the global development finance. The present study has made an attempt to understand the determinants of adoption of digital technology by the slum dwellers in Mumbai. Post second wave of COVID-19 pandemic, a survey of 200 households was conducted from September 2021 to November 2021 to analyse the determinants of digital technology adoption in the urban slums of Mumbai. Most of these informal workers are illiterate or semi-literate. It is interesting to analyse how they manage to access digital finance in the time of crisis.