Published Paper Details:

Purpose: The main intention of the present paper is know that how far the demographics of respondents impact on the study of microfinance activities. Further, the study is conducted to probe the factors driving social capital formation, factors driving women empowerment, impact of financial literacy on women empowerment and the different livelihood activities undertaken by the members. The women studies reveal that unless and until women are developed their empowerment programmes have no real meaning. Women's empowerment has been noticed as a pre-requisite condition to reduce poverty in developing nations (Aysha et al., 2018). Since independence the poverty alleviation programmes through government sponsored programmes could not yield expected result an in many cases and the implementation of welfare programmes could not trickle down to the level of poor who are living in the slums and outskirts. As a powerful tool microfinance also creates financial literacy among the SHG members. Methodology / Design: A well structured questionnaire was managed as schedule after considering the literacy level, incompleteness, rejection. A total 113 questionnaires were in the hand and out of this only 100 were usable one forming 88.49% success rate. Chi-square contingency co-efficient, Kendall's co-efficient of concordance, weighted arithmetic mean, Garrett Ranking Technique and MFLI were performed. The participants of the study include SHG members from 5 taluks selected SHGs. These participants were interviewed and the required data was collated. Findings: The study found that all demographics are supporting the study and there exist significant variation in the data. Mutual help in case of need, social relationship social trust and believing co-members are the drivers of social capital formation. The study also reveals about the ranked factors like savings formation, more self confidence and more awareness of political system, voting and context as the factors driving women empowerment. The financial literacy factors which impact on women empowerment includes in the order of ranking, better economic security as the first rank, the second rank being avoids taking poor financial decision and the third rank financially literate women take better decision during emergency. The livelihood activities undertaken by the respondents include construction worker as the first rank, the second rank awarded to vegetable selling and the third due to working in RMC Yard.