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“Over the next year, we intend to double our reach and support over two million women with cumulative loans disbursements of Rs 2,500 crore,” Chanda Kochhar, managing director & CEO of the bank, said on Saturday.
The SHG programme aims at empowering less-privileged women to become self-reliant. SHG is a term used for a group of 10-20 less-privileged women, primarily from rural and semi- urban areas, who pool resources on a periodic basis and use the money for income-generating activities such as cattle and goat rearing, kirana/grocery vending, jewellery making, handicrafts and emergency needs, among others.
To mark the International Women's Day on Saturday, the bank crossed a milestone of supporting one million women beneficiaries through its programme for SHG. ICICI has been running the programme for 30 months, catering to 164 districts in 7 states.
“We have extended loans of more than Rs 1,000 crore to 70,000 SHG. In FY13, we had disbursed about Rs 330 crore to SHG. This financial year, we have more than doubled that pace and we are going to be disbursing about Rs 850-crore loans to SHG in FY14. On an average, we are adding about 5,000 groups per month. By June 2014, we will cross another milestone. We would have assisted about 1 lakh SHGs by then,” said Kochhar.
The bank has 550 dedicated staff who run this programme. “This is not just a business of lending money but an initiative which helps empower women. This has a much larger social and economic implication for the country,” said Kochhar.
Generally the SHG pay an interest of about 14 per cent and they repay loans in the form of EMIs. The loans are anywhere between 1 and 3 years. “We have hardly seen any defaults in this business. The average ticket size is Rs 1.5 lakh per SHG,” said Kochhar.
The bank plans to add three more states -- West Bengal, Odisha and Chhattisgarh -- in the next fiscal under the SHG programme. The next step for the bank will be to provide micro-insurance products to these SHG,” said Kochhar.
