“Self Help Groups (SHGs) in India: A Study on Quality and Sustainability” (2012)
ENABLE, a National Network Enabling Self Help Movement, presented the report titled “Self Help Groups (SHGs) in India: A study on quality and sustainability.”
Highlights of the Report
There is a regional disparity in growth of SHGs.
The poorest of the poor have not been able to access benefits of SHGs as SHG norms discourage them from joining.
SHGs are mostly homogenous by social category, marital status and household economic activity; and heterogeneous by age.
More than one-third of SHGs increased monthly savings of members over a period of time with their own interest to increase group corpus, and by the facilitation of promoters and banks.
None of the SHGs follow a single criterion to select their leaders and mostly leaders were selected on the consent of majority of the group.
SHGs are perpetually dependent on banks for loans as SHGs do not increase their savings periodically to build sufficient group fund to meet the credit needs of the members which makes these groups vulnerable to external forces.
SHGs face issues such as delay in loan sanctioning, no credit linkage to quality groups, control of bank managers on SHG withdrawing their own savings.
There is a significant ‘upward mobility’ of SHG woman’s status, roles and confidence, when compared to before joining the SHG.
The relation and the mutual respect between SHGs and Panchayti Raj Institutions seem to have grown over the years and the dependency on money lenders seem to have come down.
The report made following suggestions:
There should be continuous training and capacity building of SHG members, including financial literacy
SHGs must have a system of annual elections
A system of internal audit needs to be introduced to ensure that all the SHGs have audit of their accounts at least once a year.
NRLM could partner with NGOs to strengthen NGOs
A web-based national database needs to be developed and maintained to ensure effective monitoring and support for the SHG movement in the country.
There is need to devise a policy for recognizing SHGs as institutions of the poor.
Innovations like “Bank Mitra” a carefully selected SHG member to support SHGs and the bank in facilitating SHG Bank linkage, will help in supporting SHG bank linkage.
