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Self-help groups play an important role in rural areas in reducing poverty. Microfinance and self-help groups assist the rural area people in their financial needs it is a type of banking service that ensure that unemployed a low-income level people get the better opportunity and they start to earn their livelihoods by themselves. An attempt has been made in this paper to identify some entrepreneurial activities that women can take up in the Hyderabad-Karnataka Region. This paper is divided into eight sections. First section gives the introduction. Second section deals with rural women entrepreneurship through Women SHGs. Income generating activities for Women SHGs are listed in the third section. Issues and problems of Women SHGs are discussed in the fourth section. Special Initiatives of NABARD for Women SHGs are dealt in the fifth section. A programme known as Stree Shakthi to empower women economically and socially An initiative of Department of Women and Child Development, Government of Karnataka is described in sixth section. The crux of the paper Prospects for Micro Women Enterprises in Hyderabad-Karnataka Region is dealt in the seventh section. The paper is concluded in section eight. Introduction Basically, Women’s empowerment is the process in which women individually and collectively become active, knowledgeable and goal oriented actors who take/or support initiatives to overcoming gender inequalities. Hence, Women’s empowerment refers to a strategy to achieve gender equality as well as to the inherent capacity building processes and various other factors. SHGs have, in fact, emerged as one of the major strategies for the convergence of services and activities. The SHGs across states have focused on skill development, facilitating generation, gaining access to credit from financial institutions for micro enterprises/ projects, inculcating of thrift: and management of credit for the economically deprived sections of women. The SHG is a homogenous group of rural people including women who decide to form voluntary organization for small saving amounts, known as “corpus” of the group out of which productive and contingent credit requirement of the members of the group could be met with. Therefore, MFIs are willing to lend to women enterprises and women SHGs. Women’s access to microfinance will lead to social and political empowerment. Poverty alleviation and women empowerment are the two sides of the same coin. Women empowerment plays a vital role in reducing the gender inequality. Therefore, it is suggested to take up rural micro enterprises with the support of Micro Finance to the rural women of Hyderabad-Karnataka region1. It will be more beneficial if they take up agro based women enterprises such as papad making. Concept of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) A Self Help Group is a registered or unregistered voluntary association of poor people of 10 to 20, from the same socio-economic backgrounds and it involves primarily in saving and credit activities. A SHG is formed independently without any political influences. It can be all-women group, all men-group or even a mixed group. However, it can be seen that over 90 per cent of these groups have only women members. The SHG provides not only savings mechanism, which suits the needs of the members but also provides a cost effective delivery mechanism for small credit to its members. These groups start with saving and not with credit; the group then uses its savings to give loans to members to meet their emergency and other needs. The members decide on savings per members, maximum size of loans, guarantee mechanisms in loan sanction. 1 Hyderabad-Karnataka region consists of five districts of Karnataka, viz: Bidar, Gulbarga, Raichur, Bellary and Koppal. It is considered as a backward region. Meaning of Empowerment Empowerment is not essentially political alone; it is a process having personal, economic, social and political dimensions with personal empowerment being the core of the empowerment process. In fact political empowerment will not succeed in the absence of economic empowerment. The Scheme of Micro-financing through SHGs create empowerment promoting conditions for women to move from positions of marginalisation within household decision making process and exclusion within community, to one of greater centrality, inclusion of voice. Objectives of the study The study aims to achieve the following objectives: • To study the role of SHGs in the rural development. • To find out the change in economic condition of SHG members. • To study the role of self-help groups in women empowerment. |
