feild study
e-Book-keeping Project in Bibinagar Mandal, Andhra Pradesh The Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP), an autonomous society of the Department of Rural Development, Government of Andhra Pradesh, has initiated an ICT project, named Bookkeeping for Self Help Groups (SHG). The project aims at equipping the SHGs with a portable computing device, which would enable them in maintaining records of the financial transactions in a more simple and efficient manner. This project is a part of the Indira Kranti Patham (IKP) initiative taken by the Government of Andhra Pradesh. This is a major programme of the State Government under which the Government provides ownership rights on lands to the landless poor. The vision of the programme is, “The disadvantaged communities shall be empowered to overcome all social, economic, cultural and psychological barriers through selfmanaged organisations. They will attain higher productivity with improved skills and asset base and utilise resources to full potential and gainful access to services”. With increasing activities, bookkeeping has emerged as an important function in the self management of SHGs. Despite having a long history of SHG movement in the state, SHGs continued to depend on trained book-keepers, mostly non-members, for their book-
Self Help Group Member’s Meeting in Progress
keeping. The low literacy rate among women is primarily the reason for this dependence. As a result of dependence on others, the quality of book-keeping of SHGs has suffered. The poor quality of book keeping has often affected the internal functioning of the SHGs. It has resulted in intra-SHG disputes. There are several instances of SHGs winding up due to defective book-keeping.
In general, book-keeping is viewed as a drudgery. It amply reflects in SHG book-keeping throughout the state even though SHGs are provided with books. Under e-Book-keeping project, which has been piloted in the Bibinagar Mandal of the Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh, 35 HCL and Asus Notebook PCs have been provided to 35 Village Organisations, VO (nearly 25 SHG
what Self Help group means? A Self-Help Group (SHG) is a registered or non-registered group of micro-entrepreneurs having homogeneous social and economic background, voluntarily coming together to save regular small sums of money, mutually agreeing to contribute to a common fund and to meet their emergency needs on the basis of mutual help. The group members use collective wisdom and peer pressure to ensure proper end-use of credit and timely repayment. SHG has primarily women members, aims to create a single source of borrowing for a woman. There are more than 1.2 Crore women members engaged in 9 lakh SHGs in rural Andhra Pradesh.
egov
april 2010
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