Impact and Quality Assessment of Selected Self Help Groups in Hill Districts of Assam:An Empirical Study

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 here to make a comparative assessment of quality of the SHGs in selected two hill districts of Assam (North Cachar Hill and Karbi Anglong) under the NABARD CRI Tool. Further, sincere effort is also taken in this paper to study the impact of SHGs on empowerment i.e. the psychological, economical and social well being aspects 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. In fine, it is concluded that SHGs has a positive impact on empowerment of women.