Women's credit requirement estimated at Rs 1,000 cr: Study

Bangalore, Nov 3 (UNI) Economically active poor women in the city with a monthly household income of Rs 3,000 to Rs 7,000 were deprived of institutional credit and their credit requirement was estimated to be over Rs 1,000 crore, a survey conducted by Delphi Research Services Private Ltd said.

The study on 'Economically Active Poor Women in Bangalore-2005' was released here today by Ujjivan Financial Services, a city-based micro-finance institution. Ujjivan had commissioned the study prior to launching its micro-finance operations in the city to have a better understanding of the urban poor here.

The comprehensive study of over 500 individuals had suggested that the average monthly personal income of self-employed women was higher than that of salaried women. Over 80 per cent of these women live in rented houses with minimum facilities.

The socio-economic profile and quality of life incidated that the salaried women were relatively younger, had a smaller family size and had more meals per day and less likely to have children in the 0-15 age group, compared to the self-employed. The study also highlighted that the self-employed were less educated, more likely to have a working member in the household and males not gainfully employed, when compared to their salaried counterparts.

The study also revealed that the salaried women were much more likely to be servicing one or more personal loans at any given time than the self-employed and the average loan size for the self-employed was Rs 10,132, while for the salaried it was Rs 8,192.

The average rate of interest for the self-emmployed was 5.11 per cent and for the salaried class it was 5.4 per cent.

Ujjivan CEO Samit Ghosh, who spoke on the occasion, said the urban poor comprised over 100 million of the country's population and was growing rapidly. He exuded confidence that the research would spark more of its kind and be the stepping stone for the real battle to eliminate the curse of poverty.

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