The poor would rather take a loan at a high interest rate and simultaneously save that amount in a low-interest paying bank account to enforce saving discipline which is otherwise hard to follow as no banks accept daily amounts, and by the time the daily wage earners are ready to deposit their daily earnings, most banks are closed. The Sahara group, with agents running in numbers anywhere between 600,000 to a million would help this problem by collecting money from the poor at their doorsteps every evening. The RBI (Reserve Bank of India) has now cracked down on spurious moneylending techniques employed by the Sahara. But one wonders why Sahara was successful in employing these techniques in the first place. The Indian banking scenario, with a penetration rate of 747 bank branches per 100,000 people perhaps gives us an insight into why. Read more here.