Self-help groups

Self-help groups are started by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that generally have broad anti-poverty agendas. Self-help groups are seen as instruments for goals including empowering women, developing leadership abilities among the poor and the needy, increasing school enrolment and improving nutrition and the use of birth control.

A SHG is a community-based group with 10-25 members. Members are usually women from similar social and economic backgrounds, all voluntarily coming together to save small sums of money, on a regular basis. They pool their resources to become financially stable, taking loans from their collective savings in times of emergency or financial scarcity, important life events or to purchase assets.

Functions of Neelkanth Self Help groups:-

It looks to build the functional capacity of the poor and the marginalized in the field of employment and income generating activities.

It provides helpful loan with terms decided by the group at the market driven rates.

Such groups work as a collective guarantee system for members who propose to borrow from organized sources. The poor collect their savings and save it in banks. In return they receive easy access to loans with a small rate of interest to start their micro unit enterprise.

Now come to the work, how Neelkanth  foundation works for all SHGs:-

These are provided by NGO to each and every Self  help group member-

Member passbook — Passbook for each member of the SHG

Minutes book- Record to maintain their minutes of the meeting of the SHG

Savings book — Ledger to maintain the savings pooled by the SHG members.

Cashbook — Ledger to maintain cash in hand and the cash balance in the bank.

Loan book — Ledger to maintain the loan disbursed to the members of the SHG.

Neelkanth foundation also does these following steps with running 17 self -help groups are:-

• Conduct Meetings at regular intervals- Each and every self -help group has a meeting on 17^th of every month.
• The members of the each group do regular consistent savings.

• The book of accounts are maintaining up to date.

Bank account procedure under Neelkanth foundation:

For an SHG to open a bank account, these are the following steps:

Resolution  is passed by SHG to open a bank account in the nearest bank branch. This resolution  have all the signatures of the SHG members.

As a part of the resolution, three office bearers are authorized to operate the savings bank account with a condition that any two office bearers can transact with the bank.

Application to open a savings bank account is prepared and submitted to the bank manager by the office-bearers.

A seal for the particular SHG group is made and the office bearers are submit their proof of identity and address as a part of the KYC norms.

Office bearers carry the above documents and fill the account opening for opening the bank account.