Growth and Disparity of Micro Finance through Self Help Groups in India

Self-help groups are voluntary associations of people with common interests formed to achieve collective social and economic goals. Such groups are organised for mutual help and benefit. The initial operations of SHGs start with collecting savings from members. These groups inculcate the habit of thrift among the members. The Self-help groups provide economic benefits to the women by providing income generating activities. It is an attempt is made to study the progress of microfinance through self-help groups with some goals such as: to study the progress of the formation of self-help groups in India. It expressed the progress of microfinance through the SHG Bank linkage programme in India. To study the regional variation in the progress of self-help groups in different regions of India. It analyzes the variations in savings balance in different regions of India and explores the variations in loan disbursements in different regions of India. The most important observation that can be noted is that the number of microfinance institutions is rising enormously. The SHG Bank Linkage programme has played an important role in the progress of the disbursement of credit to SHGs. It is found that except for the central region in all other regions, there is a rising trend in the regional share of the progress of SHGs under the SHG-Bank linkage programme. However, there was a higher level of disparity in the physical spread of progress of SHGs in the different regions of the nation in 1999-00. It shows that the performance of SHGs in the southern region is better than the performance in other regions so far as the average savings balance per SHG is concerned.