Assessing Awareness of Mudra Loans Among Traders in Mumbai City

This study attempted to find out the contribution of Mudra loans towards financial inclusion and find out the awareness level of traders in Mumbai city with reference to the Mudra loan scheme. The first research objective attempts to find out how Mudra loans are contributing towards financial inclusion. The research findings indicate that Mudra loans are providing loans to diverse categories of borrowers and contributing to financial inclusion. Women entrepreneurs took more loans under the small loan category of Shishu and Kishore in comparison to the Tarun loan category. Furthermore, the study calculated the correlation between the total loan disbursement amount and the total number of loan accounts, which was found to be 0.51, indicating a moderate level of correlation. For the second research objective, regarding awareness level among traders in Mumbai city regarding the Mudra loan scheme, using a one-sample Wilcoxon signed-rank test, the researcher failed to reject the null hypothesis for both knowledge level and accessibility level. On the other hand, the researcher accepted the alternative hypothesis and found that the median of benefit level regarding the Mudra loans to small businesses is significant. This shows that the traders accepted that the Mudra loan is beneficial for them. But they lacked knowledge about the scheme and were not aware of accessing the same. The researcher further calculated the rank-biserial correlation ( r ) and found it to be .6702, indicating that the results are of practical significance and are also impactful. JEL Codes: G21, O16, L26, D14, O17