Committee formed to look into micro-finance for women

Government today formed a four member committee of senior bankers to look into the various issues of micro-finance for women.
The Women and Child Development (WCD) Minister Maneka Gandhi today held a high level meeting in Delhi with bankers and other stakeholders for streamlining and reforming the system of micro-finance to women.
The Committee, formed to look into the various issues of micro-finance for women with reference to Rashtriya Mahila Kosh, will submit its report by the end of August this year.
The participants included senior representatives of HSBC, ICICI, SBI, NABARD, BMB, PNB, Women's cooperative and finance ministry.
In the meeting, the participants discussed the possibilities of strengthening and restructuring Rashtriya Mahila Kosh (RMK) to make it more effective.

The participants emphasised the need to build linkages between RMK, Bhartiya Mahila Bank (BMB) and other financial institutions, step up the percentage of finance for women in general by the banking system, capacity building of prospective borrowers to avoid bad debts and gender sensitisation of lenders among others.

The WCD Secretary V S Oberoi also emphasised the need to increase professionalism in the working of Rashtriya Mahila Kosh and tie-up between BMB.
RMK has a corpus of Rs 100 cr but it has added Rs 129.17 cr to its corpus through interest earned from loans and investments. Thus, currently, it has a total fund base of Rs 229.17 cr.

It has reached out to 7.35 lakh women beneficiaries through a network of 1510 NGOs and their Self-Help Groups.
The RMK was set up in 1993 under the Women and Child Welfare Ministry.
The RMK, which follows a quasi-formal credit delivery mechanism involving simple and minimum procedure, provides micro-finance services without collateral for livelihood and income generation activities and micro enterprises among others.