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Abstract: As per Census 2011, the workforce participation rate at all India level was 25.51 percent for females and 53.26% for males. This reflects the low economic participation and poor economic status of women in India even after several years of independence. For socio-economic empowerment of women, provision of finance at easy terms and conditions is necessary. In spite of several reformations in the banking sectors such as Nationalization of Banks, the establishment of Regional Rural Banks etc, banks failed to meet the small financial needs of people especially women due to problems of recovery and high transaction cost. Hence, the need for alternative credit delivery mechanism was felt in 1980 and in 1992, an initiation was taken by NABARD to introduce Micro-finance Programme. RBI has supported in the implementation of the programme by giving guidelines to banks to consider this programme as part of their mainstream credit operations both at policy and implementation levels. Micro-finance is believed to be one of such tools which take care of the financial needs of poor and of women who were excluded before by the banks in the provision of the loan. The benefit of this programme can be extended to women extensively if adequate efforts are made by all banking sectors to implement the programme. Therefore an attempt is made in this paper to understand the comparative roles played by the banking sectors in the empowerment of women by implementing the micro-finance programme.