Govt mulls merger of two financial instns for empowering women

In an ambitious initiative, the NDA government has mooted a proposal to merge two financial institutions aimed at empowering women.
Set up in the final months of the Congress-led UPA government, the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB) with an initial corpus of Rs 1,000 crores, and the Rashtriya Mahila Kosh (RMK), which was established way back in 1993 to provide micro-loans to women, may be merged, the Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi said today
Gandhi said the proposal to merge the two financial institutions and strengthening of credit facility to needy women will be discussed at a meeting with representatives of top banks tomorrow.

She said the performance of BMB and RMK was not satisfactory and that is why government was mulling merger of the two to strengthen the lending facility to women.
"There is already a women's bank in the Finance Ministry which has not worked and we have Rashtriya Mahila Kosh which too has not worked," Gandhi told PTI in an interview.
Listing empowerment of women as a priority area, Gandhi said facilitating funding needs of poor women will be one of the priority initiatives of her Ministry.

"Banks should make it easy to lend to women, not just to self help groups," she said.

The previous UPA government had set up the first all-woman bank in November last year as a step towards empowerment of women. The bank currently has about 25 branches across the country.
The RMK was set up in 1993 under the Women and Child Welfare Ministry with an initial corpus of Rs 31 crore. A senior official at the Ministry said RMK has a total fund of Rs 214.18 crore as on date.
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.