Micro-finance revolution now occupies a prime role in women's empowerment and poverty alleviation. The ADB (2000) defines microfinance as "the provision of a broad range of financial services such as deposits, loans, payment services, money transfers and insurance to poor and low income households and their micro-enterprises.
For developing nations, aquaculture is often regarded as an opportunity to provide jobs and food security. However, as a recent report suggests, aquaculture has the potential to empower women too. Usually a fisherman catches fish and hands over the same mostly to the fisherwomen of his family for sale as raw fish, and also, as needed, for conversion into dried/salted fish for marketing locally and in shandies at various centres. The fish are also taken in head-load baskets from door to door. All these efforts, however, result in low margins. When fish are processed by way of sun-drying, salt curing, the process enables the fisherwomen to store the processed fish and sell them as convenient at higher prices depending on transport facilities and market conditions. The processed fish are normally taken to places where there is good demand for such fish. One aspect in this context is that the fisherwomen need financial support from banks and other organised financial institutions. In this context, the fisherwomen find self-help groups as an appropriate source, from where they can, as a member, borrow loans at very low interest to meet the financial recruitment for the purpose of marketing the value-added fish (sun-dried/salted) to the consumers at a lucrative price. In this background, fisherwomen have formed into various self help groups. An attempt has been made to study indebtedness and incidence of poverty among fisherwomen households. The present study therefore has endeavoured to examine the borrowing and repayment practices adopted by fisherwomen of sample households towards different sources of finance in the study area.
In this study, multi-stage sampling technique was used in the selection of the units. The sampling involved the selection of 100 fisherwomen entrepreneur households on random basis. Main objectives of the present study are as follows:
Provide specific recommendation for innovative schemes/packages for small scale fisheries development.
In this background, the adoption of micro-finance system can supplement the role of banks and financial institutions in helping to solve the problems of poverty and unemployment in the country. Micro credit is considered as ideal to tackle the twin problems encountered by institutional credit agencies serving the poor viz., higher transaction costs and poor recovery.
This paper has covered the status of SHG Model Micro-finance in fisheries sector in the State of West Bengal with special reference to North 24 Parganas District. Potentials of micro-credit extension in coastal districts has also been discussed.