Practices of Self Help Groups in Rural India: A Comparative Assessment on Quality and Impact

Self help groups (SHGs) have emerged as popular method of working with people in recent years. Since SHG based micro finance programmes cover a large number of women, it is expected that such programmes will have an important bearing on women's empowerment. The SHGs today have become a vehicle to pursue diverse developmental agendas and even for the profit motive. To avert such a situation, growth with quality has became the paramount agenda of today among different stakeholders, as there is an over reaching concern about sustainability of the SHG movement in India. An effort is made in this paper to make a comparative analysis on the quality of the SHGs in three selected districts of Assam (Cachar, Nagaon, and Karbi Anglong) under NABARD CRI and MYRADA Assessment tools. Further, sincere effort is also given to study the performance of some selected SHGs in the study area on various indicators and also to study the impact of SHGs on the psychological, economical and social well being i.e. empowerment on its members. It is observed that due to fast growing of the SHG-bank linkage program in the State, the quality of SHG has come under stress. Some of the factors affecting the quality of SHGs are the target oriented approach of the government in preparing group, inadequate incentive to NGO's for nurturing their groups etc. Further, it is observed that impact on decision making pattern ranks first followed by economic empowerment and then psychological aspects. Confidence building ranks fourth while Social empowerment ranks the fifth and so on.