ICICI Bank plans cumulative loan disbursements of Rs 2,500 cr under Self Help Groups

Private sector lender ICICI Bank is planning to double their reach and support over two million women with cumulative loan disbursements of Rs 2,500 crore under its programme for Self Help Groups (SHG) over the next year. "Over the next year, we intend to double our reach and support over two million women with cumulative loansdisbursements of Rs 2,500 crore," said Chanda Kochhar, managing director & CEO of the bank. 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 their resources on a periodic basis and use this money for income generating activities like cattle and goat rearing, kirana/grocery vending, jewellery making, handicrafts and emergency needs among others. On the occasion of Women's day on Saturday the bank crossed a milestone of supporting one million women beneficiaries through its programme for SHG. The programme has been active in the last 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. In this financial years 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 SHG 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% and they repay the loans in the form of EMIs. The loans are anywhere between 1-3 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 namely 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. Source :  http://www.business-standard.com/article/finance/icici-bank-plans-cumulative-loan-disbursements-of-rs-2-500-cr-under-self-help-groups-114030800399_1.html