Smaller investments bigger benefits

SKDRDP in order to develop the rural masses provides 3 main financial instruments.

• Loans
• Insurance
• Pensions

These microfinance activities provides stable ground for poverty alleviation. The loans are provided by the banks and SKDRDP acts as bank linkage to members. SKDRDP brings banking closer to people with its BC Suvidha Scheme. The BC Suvidha also mobilises savings causing people to inculcate habit of saving. The Business Correspondent lay the foundation of stronger growth. To make the families more stronger from the uncertainties of life, SKDRDP provides Insurance and Pensions. SKDRDP acts as an aggregator/ collection agency for National Pension Scheme by central government. Being a very important program NPS works as division of SKDRDP. There are 2 Insurance programs of SKDRDP. Jeevan Madhura Life Insurance and Sampoorna Suraksha Health Insurance. The Jeevan Madhura is sponsored by LIC and SKDRDP acts as Insurance Broker. Sampoorna Suraksha is a section 25 company and Subsidiary of SKDRDP. Sampoorna Suraksha provides health insurance.

Linkage to the banks  (erstwhile Pragathi Nidhi)

SKDRDP initiated a micro-financing scheme known as Pragathinidhi in 1996, which provides loans to members to help promote their livelihoods or develop infrastructure. The linkage to the bank provides adequate funds without any administrative formalities, a convenient tenure, easy accessibility and easy weekly repayment installments. The funds required for lending are sourced from bank loans or the savings of the members which are deposited with the group's account.

In 2003, with plans to extend linkage to the banks on a larger scale, SKDRDP reinvigorated the program with systematic procedures. The group can utilize it for agricultural purposes, infrastructure development, non-formal sector development activities and group enterprises. Now the pragathinidhi has been stopped and SKDRDP has started direct linkage to the banks.

Business Correspondent/Banking Facilitator (BC/BF)

Almost 50% of our country men / women do not have bank accounts. It is the endeavor of the government of India to make everybody an account holder in the bank. Called as Financial Inclusion, this is a gigantic task. SKDRDP has been acting as Business correspondent for achieving financial inclusion. This model envisages financial inclusion at the door step of the poor by opening village offices known as the customer service point. SKDRDP took an active part in implementing the Financial Inclusion plan of the government of India by working as Business Correspondent and Business Facilitator (BC and BF) in all districts of Karnataka. Under the programme SKDRDP promotes Self Help groups enabling the poor people in the remote villages to access banking facilities at their door steps.

At present SKDRDP is working as BC/BF for five major commercial Banks:

• Bank of Baroda
• IDBI Bank
• Karnataka Grameena Bank
• State Bank of India
• Union Bank of India

As BC, the main responsibility of SKDRDP is to provide door step banking services mainly cash deposit and cash withdrawal from SHG accounts. For this purpose SKDRDP runs 'Customer Service Points' in all the villages of Karnataka State. These centres are operational one day in a week. on the given day the cash assistant appointed by SKDRDP visits the center.  The SHGs in that area bring their cash deposits to this center. By using a POT (Point Of Transaction) machine, the money collected are deposited in their respective SHG accounts.

SIDBI PRAYAS Yojana

SIDBI Samvruddhi Prayas Scheme is a scheme which provides necessary support to the members of our Self-Help Groups to become self-employed and self-reliant. The project helps the member for financial support up to Rs. 5 lakhs for those keen on self-employment from Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI). 5000+ SHG/JLG members have utilized these benefits and are successfully pursuing self-employment at their village.

Digitisation of SHG records and documents 

SKDRDP has completely digitized the records and documents of all SHGs promoted by it. VB and MSQL based software developed by SKDRDP called ’Suvidha’ has facilitated digitization of socio-economic data as well as day today financial transactions of all the Self Help Groups on real time basis. This software has reduced the burden of book keeping to a great extent and also ensured proper documentation and monitoring. For end to end management of self-help groups, SKDRDP has developed ‘SKDRDP SHG APP’ in 2016. The application deals with both financial and non-financial parameters of SHG functioning. It is interactive with data stored at SKDRDP and Bank server. It is used in submitting loan demand of groups in digital form which hastens the loan processing and makes the loan available in short period. It also provides the facility to track the activities of field staffs and to evaluate them. It is dynamic and generates various reports to track the functioning and health of SHGs. This application is very much user friendly and adaptable to android phones.

 

Launch of digitized SHG transaction Campaign

In a first of its kind in India SKDRDP, in 2017, launched ‘Digitized SHG transaction Campaign’ which aims to convert all the transactions in SHGs to cash free mode. Under this programme, initially all the SHG members will be opening their SB accounts in banks, through which they will do all their financial transactions. These SB accounts in turn will be linked to their SHG accounts. Thus, it is ultimately resulting in cash free transactions. In spite of the initial hiccups SKDRDP is able to complete financial inclusion data of all its members. More than 3 million Prime Minister Jandhan Yojana Accounts (PMJDY) have been opened and become operational. In a tie up with NABARD, SKDRDP is providing digitised data to NABARD data base regarding financial transactions of 2,50,000 Self Help Groups in Karnataka state. In this programme the data regarding the financial transactions of the SHGs are uploaded at monthly intervals to the Eshakti portal of NABARD for the first of its kind in the country.