Sanjay Kanti Das^1,, Amalesh Bhowal²

Micro finance has garnered significant worldwide attention as being a successful tool to meet substantial demand for financial services by low-income. India occupies a significant place and a niche in global micro finance through promotion of the Self Help Groups (SHGs) and the home grown SHG-Bank Linkage Programme model (SBLP). Today, there are several agencies working for SHG promotion in the country. However, quality of the SHGs is the major challenge that the SHG movement is confronted with at this point of time in the country. Sa-Dhan (2003) has been initiated one modest effort and identified a lot of issues set out in the quality assessment of SHGs. The main objective of this paper is to assess the opinion of the direct stakeholders (i.e. Promoters, Donors, Financial Institutions and Group itself) of SHGs regarding the parameters (like design, governance, operational, impact etc.) to be considered while assessing the quality of SHGs. The study is conducted by using multi-stage random sampling method to collect primary data from the selected Development Blocks of Nagaon districts of Assam. It is observed that there exists enough evidence to conclude that there is a no difference among the opinion of the direct stakeholders of SHGs regarding the parameters to be considered while assessing the quality of SHGs. It is also observed that there exists enough evidence to conclude that there are differences among direct stakeholders regarding perception of stakeholders about on whose perspective parameters to be considered for assessing quality of SHG.

micro finance, perceptions, quality parameters, Self Help Groups, stakeholders