By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan Student loans are getting bigger and rarer. The poorest applicants are being shut out first INDIA'S BANKS have never lent so much to students. Nor have they lent to so few. Between 2014 and 2025 outstanding education loans rose from 523bn rupees to 1.37trn, a compound annual rate of about 9.5%. Over the same period the number of borrowers fell, from 2.34m accounts to 2.06m. The average loan has roughly tripled, to about 670,000 rupees. Tuition, hostels and the cost of living have all outrun family incomes, and the households that feel it first are those with the least to pledge. Start with the rule that governs them. In 2010 the Reserve Bank of India, working with the Indian Banks' Association, set the ceiling on collateral-free education loans at 400,000 rupees. Anything above that needs a guarantor or a pledged asset: land, a house, a fixed deposit. Fifteen years of fee inflation later, a professional degree routinely costs far more. The limit has q...
By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan A collateral-free education loan guarantee that reached 410,333 borrowers by November 2019 sent about 70% of its sanctioned money to General-category borrowers and about 9.5% to SC and ST borrowers combined; a 2026 study of caste-marginalized market actors suggests why access alone does not guarantee fair inclusion. Why markets are not caste-neutral A 2026 Business & Society study by Jagadale, Mohapatra and Singh argues that market inclusion is not the same as fair participation when caste shapes the terms of exchange. Bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) and subsistence-marketplace research, the authors say, treats poverty as a shortage of income and access, and so overlooks birth-ascribed hierarchies that decide who is trusted, who is served well and who is treated with dignity. The authors propose the Bottom of the Caste Pyramid (BOCP) as a relational and processual lens. It is relational because caste-marginalized actors are pushed to the bottom thro...