Self Help Group – A way of success for poverty alleviation and women empowerment in India

Abstract

Self help group is a group for helping own and each other within the members also. In other words , self help group means a group of 5 to 10 members ( specially included the rural poor women) coming from the same socio-economic background with their little amount of savings and gather these savings in their common SHG fund on a regular basis so that they can use these amount of the money in any emergency purposes or in some income generating process to improve their standard of living.

The concept of self help was popularized since the Bangladesh Grameen Model has been established by Muhammad Yunus during 1970s. Today , in India the self help group bank linkage programme (SHG-BLP) becomes the world’s largest microfinance programme. The main purpose of the self help group is to make self-employed the rural poor women. However, there are some obstacles also to provide proper financial assistance to the those needy poor people. Again, there is regional wide diversity in the effectiveness of the working of the self-help groups in India. In the southern region, we get much more success stories of the self-help groups. A long way to go to reduce such regional inequalities to the effectiveness of the SHGs by providing proper education, training to become self independent, guidance and supervision of NGOs and banks related with that SHGs, health facilities, voices against domestic violence etc.