Evaluating the Role of Digital Financial Infrastructure in Expanding
Equitable Credit Access for Urban Migrant Workers in India

Aadit Goyal

doi:10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i09.035

Title: Evaluating the Role of Digital Financial Infrastructure in Expanding Equitable Credit Access for Urban Migrant Workers in India
Authors: Aadit Goyal
Journal: International Journal of Social Science and Economic Research (IJSSER) ISSN: 2455-8834 Volume: 11 Issue: 9 Publication Date: September 2026 DOI: 10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i09.035
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Aadit Goyal Prabhavati Padamshi Soni International Junior College
MLA 8 Goyal, Aadit. "Evaluating the Role of Digital Financial Infrastructure in Expanding Equitable Credit Access for Urban Migrant Workers in India." Int. j. of Social Science and Economic Research, vol. 11, no. 9, Sept. 2026, pp. 5061-5082, doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i09.035. Accessed Sept. 2026. APA 6 Goyal, A. (2026, September). Evaluating the Role of Digital Financial Infrastructure in Expanding Equitable Credit Access for Urban Migrant Workers in India. Int. j. of Social Science and Economic Research, 11(9), 5061-5082. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i09.035 Chicago Goyal, Aadit. "Evaluating the Role of Digital Financial Infrastructure in Expanding Equitable Credit Access for Urban Migrant Workers in India." Int. j. of Social Science and Economic Research 11, no. 9 (September 2026), 5061-5082. Accessed September, 2026. https://doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2026.v11i09.035.
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ABSTRACT: India has built one of the largest bodies of public digital financial infrastructure in the world: Aadhaar identity, paperless e-KYC, the Unified Payments Interface, Direct Benefit Transfers, and the Jan Dhan accounts that carry them. This paper asks how far this infrastructure has reached the country’s urban migrant workers, and how far reaching them has turned into something they can use, in the form of wages received in full and credit they can actually obtain. It works from a corpus of eighteen studies covering migrant garment workers in Bangalore, women street vendors in Delhi, urban-poor households in Pune, construction workers, and national survey data. The analysis runs in three parts. The first tracks digital transaction use among urban migrant labour across the five years to FY24 and finds that it moved from marginal to ordinary: retail digital payment value grew roughly sevenfold to USD 3.6 trillion, and street vendors came to receive close to half of what they were paid digitally. The second sets reported migrant earnings against the statutory minimum wages in force where those earnings were made, and finds workers at the weakest defensible reading of the floor or below it, with construction workers hired through middlemen holding no wage records at all. The third asks why usage rose and where it stalled, and identifies fear of fraud, low literacy, KYC and documentation requirements, and gendered control of devices as the binding constraints. What the analysis reveals is a gap between payments and credit. The infrastructure has delivered access, is delivering usage unevenly, and has so far delivered very little credit that can be verified. The barriers that cap payment use are the same ones that decide who builds a transaction record, so lending based on that record risks repeating the exclusion it was meant to correct.

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