Thank you. That's a very interesting perspective.
I wish the world would divide itself as evenly as for-profit and non-profit, but my experience is that it doesn't. There are some for-profit institutions I've seen that are highly socially motivated and have great impacts on their clients, and there are non-profit institutions I've seen that, in their chase for more funding, have applied some of these practices that are abusive.
There hasn't been enough time to carry out the studies in India to see the difference. The difference that I've heard about is not research-related but rather more anecdotal.
It's complicated in India because the government wants savings to go into state-owned savings banks, and they don't allow many microfinance organizations to take in savings. However, when those institutions that did have a banking licence took in savings, their clients stayed with them and continued paying even when the politicians said they didn't need to pay back their microfinance loans. They knew the money they had borrowed was their neighbour's money, so they wanted to make sure that money went back.
A group that takes in savings also tends to be more conservative in its growth projections, just because it knows it needs to protect the deposits it has on base. It's not losing money that some investor from outside has put in or some donor has put in; this is money in their community that they have to make sure is protected.
The other difference I've heard about anecdotally is that those organizations that invested more in their clients, whether for-profit or non-profit, and had active training programs and group meetings that added value to their clients tended to survive this crisis much better than those that did not invest much in their clients.