Book Reviews : Biswaroop Das, Role and Impact of Microfinance on Poor: A Study of Clients using Micro Credit in two South Indian States, Ahmedabad: Friends of Women's World Banking, 2001, 270 pp

into the poverty lending . sector by both national and international agencies. The number of extra-state agencies dealing with small credit and saving has proliferated, show-casing a wide variety of organisational and operational styles. Even as the microfinance system starts getting institutionalised in India, many issues pertaining to the complex relationship between debt and the socio-cultural milieu that accompanies poverty in the specific context of India have remained unnoticed. Also, the impact of microfinancial operation on the life of the poor borrowers, more often than not, are taken for granted. This book by Biswaroop Das attempts to address a few such questions that tend to be ignored in conventional evaluations of microfinance programmes. Incidentally, the study that forms the basis of the book has been undertaken at the behest of the Friends of Women’s World Bank-