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Grameen Credit Score
What it is
A credit scoring framework announced in Budget 2025-26 to assess rural and self-help-group borrowers using alternative data - SHG repayment records, government scheme participation, utility and telecom payments - rather than conventional bureau history
It is intended to let formal lenders underwrite borrowers who are invisible to traditional credit scoring
Impact on industries
- Attacks the binding constraint in rural credit, which is assessment rather than availability - a lender cannot price risk it cannot measure
- Would let SFBs and microfinance lenders move borrowers from group-liability lending to individual underwriting, raising ticket sizes without abandoning the segment
- Alternative data quality is uneven and thin outside SHG networks, so early scores may misclassify exactly the marginal borrowers the framework targets
- Announced rather than built - design, data-sharing architecture and lender adoption all remain to be settled, so impact is prospective