Role of Banks in Financing Women Self Help Groups

The concept of self help group has been evolved for the rural and semi urban women to improve their living conditions. In India, this scheme is implemented with the help of NABARD as a main nodal agency in rural development. Commercial Banks, Regional Rural Banks and Co-operative banks play an important role in saving mobilization and financing to various activities of SHGs. The present paper is an attempt to study the growth of women SHGs, savings of women SHGs and loan disbursement to women SHGs. It also analyses the agency wise savings and loan disbursement of women SHGs in India. The study is based on secondary data and the time period of the study is 2007- 08 to 2012-13. The data has been tabulated and analysed by using ratio analyses, percentage and compound growth rate (CGR). The study revealed that the woman SHGs forms a major share in the total SHGs in India. The growth rate of women SHGs is also higher than that of total SHGs, as regards number of saving account, saving amount and amount of loan disbursement.