Women empowerment through self help groups: A case study in Chennai

Empowerment is now increasingly seen as a process by which the one's without power gain greater control over their lives. This means control over material assets, intellectual resources and ideology. It involves power to, power with and power within. Some define empowerment as a process of awareness, of capacity building leading to greater participation, effective decision-making power and control leading to transformative action. The study aims to analysis the economic empowerment of women through SHGs in Chennai. Totally 134 respondents were selected from 20 SHGs of three area. Simple random sampling method was adopted to select the samples. This is purely a descriptive study. The major aim of the SHGs is to promote savings and to credit for the productive and consumption purposes. This is true because many people in the study area joins the SHGs for getting loan and promote their personal savings, in addition to get social status. It is found that the income of the women has been increased after joining the SHGs. The monthly household expenditure has been raised to considerable level. But the savings is increasing at slow rate, because the incremental expenditure is higher. Mostly they are spending for present consumption. The members should change it. The good practice of the women SHGs in the study area is repayment of the loan in time. The repayment of loan is regular and within the time, it can be concluded that the economic activities of SHGs are quite success. In this way SHGs in north Tamil Nadu are very successful to develop women empowerment and rural areas.