Growth and Performance of Self Help Group’s - An Exploratory Study

Today there are Mainstream Micro Finance Institutions like National Agricultural Bank for Rural Development (NABARD), Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) etc., which are creating micro credit, in rural areas by extending micro finance to Self Help Group (SHG’s) with the help of formal credit institutions, making it an effective poverty reducing strategy and simultaneously promoting rural development. SHG’s were initiated to empower the economically disadvantaged people, who were neglected by formal credit and savings institutions. Micro finance has shown that poor people, when given access to timely and responsive financial assistance, use the proceeds to not only increase their assets and income, but also repay their debts. NABARD, through its Micro Credit Innovations, is the facilitator and mentor of microfinance initiatives in the country. The model of Self help group- bank linage programme (SBLP) has evolved as a cost-effective mechanism for providing financial services to the unreached and deserving poor households. The initiative started as a pilot to link around 500 SHGs of poor to the formal financial institutions during the year 1992-93.The success of the pilot program has shown that Micro Finance can go beyond poverty reduction, to addresses issues of health, education, gender and over all development The present paper is a comparative study of the agency wise i.e. commercial banks, regional rural banks, and cooperative banks, performance in the SHG’s - bank linkage program in Telangana, from2014-18,. The paper also presents an in-depth, analysis of the number of self-help groups, Amount of savings outstanding, amount of loan outstanding of the SHGs, , and total loans disbursed to them through SBLP, generating micro credit to reduce poverty and boost rural development. Key words: NABARD, Micro Finance, SHG’s, SBLP, poverty reduction, rural Development,