Jeevantirth Mahila Savings and Credit Cooperative Society Ltd

“I Measure The Progress Of A Community By The Degree Of Progress Witch Women Have Achieved”

-B.R. Ambedkar

What We Do?

With the objective of helping the rag picker women, domestic workers and daily wage earner women of RamaPirNo Tekro and nearby slums; we facilitated to form “Mahila bachat ane Dhiran Mandli” for our 1,500+ SHG members. Through this special purpose vehicle, now they are able to save regularly, acquire deposits from the members, provide loans to the member at reasonable rates of interest for education, health; for paying high interest debts, repairing house, family – social functions or in emergency etc. They do many women empowerment related activities also on their own.

Why We Do?

Through Savings and Credit Co-operatives Society we wanted to form community membership-based financial institution that is formed and owned by their members in promotion of their economic interests. We want to mobilize and intermediate savings exclusively with in their membership under the co-operative statute.

Theory of Change:

Saving and Credit Cooperative Society is in a way Poverty-oriented Social Banking System, which provides financial services for poorer target groups, gives target group-oriented support and provides development aid to the poor so that they can acquire financial literacy, come out of the trap of debt and poverty, manage their urgent needs and raise their standard of living by improving their economic condition helping each other.

What is next for Self Help Group movement in India?

Currently, SHGs are, or at least perceived as micro-finance units which mainly does savings and credit for the bottom of pyramid. The Panchsutra which SHGs have to comply with are: regular meeting, regular savings, regular internal lending, regular repayment and regular bookkeeping. This connotes SHGs are community based informal micro-finance institutions. The challenge before us is this.

Can we transform SHGs as business units?

Can we Use SHG Network for delivering Government services?

Can SHGs be a tool for combating Social Problems?

Jeevantirth is exploring to work in these directions in the coming years.

Please join hands!

Credit co-operative society is completely managed by elected members among themselves. Everybody has similar rights in all manners. They can take part effectively in the turn of events or amendments of the society policies. This demonstrates that all members are similarly significant and the credit co-operative society is independent based administration.

Credit and saving cooperatives around the world are facing serious and fundamental problems. These include basic concepts relating to the nature and aim of the cooperatives, their structure and the principles under which they operate. We need to look at the nature of credit and savings cooperatives and how they should set interest rates, safeguard members’ savings, deal with surpluses and, if possible, provide marketing services to ensure loan recoveries. We need to address many issues such as failure to pay proper interest on savings, lack of incentive to reduce operating costs, misunderstanding of share capital and surpluses, interest charges on loans being too low, good management, adequate loan recovery etc.

In future it can be converted in to multi-purpose societies and federations and the different role each can play.