India: Reserve Bank of India Is Working on Public Credit Registry to Improve Access to Micro Credit

Credit penetration is particularly low for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector where the ticket size is generally believed to be between one to ten million rupees, said Viral Acharaya, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). 

He said that in an emerging economy like India, it is always felt that the smaller entrepreneurs, mostly operating under the informal economy, do not get enough credit as they are informationally opaque to their lenders. Thus to solve the information problem that affects access to credit for micro entrepreneurs, RBI has initiated work on a Public Credit Registry (PCR).

The PCR has been envisaged as a database of core credit information-an infrastructure of sorts on which users of credit data can build further analytics.