Nabard has launched a pilot project for complete digitization of women SHGs in an attempt to promote financial inclusion and improve the interaction between SHG members and banks. Minister of state for finance Jayant Sinha launched the program at a function in Ramgard in Jharkhand. Speaking on the occasion, he appreciated the initiative and said the need for higher coverage of women under Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojana is very imperative and hoped this will create a mechanism for wider participation of women in the program. There have been major bottlenecks in SHG bank linkage programe like the need for absence of an effective interface between the SHG members and the banks, timely credit linkage of the SHGs and problems in book keeping because of the low literacy levels of the women. Nabard chairman Harsh Kumar Bhanwala said the project will benefit various stakeholders and facilitate mainstreaming of SHG members with Aadhar based financial inclusion and PMJDY enabling access to wide range of financial services. He added that digitization will bring transparency, credibility to operations of SHGs through inbuilt grading MIS and thereby increasing the comfort of bankers in credit appraisal, disbursement and monitoring. There are over 74 lakh SHGs in the country having bank accounts, out of which around 42 lakh are credit-linked which will benefit from digitisation as and when the project is expanded across India. The data of SHGs and their members will be fed into the input device (tablet/mobile handset) which will be uploaded in the secured and dedicated website.
