Appreciating the efforts of rural women associated with Self Help Groups (SHGs) in creating financially viable livelihood-generating opportunities for their members, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said in the past seven years SHGs have done a laudible job by repaying banks loans, as he released Rs 1,625 crore as capitalisation support fund for over four lakh such groups.

Modi also pointed out that there was a time when bank loans close to 9% became nonperforming assets (NPA), but now it has come down to 2-3%.

Taking a jibe at the previous governments, Modi said for years, the amount of effort that should have been put in to economically empower women was not made. “When our government came, we saw that there were crores of sisters of the country who did not even have bank accounts. That is why we first started a huge campaign to open Jan Dhan accounts,” the PM said. He added that today there are more than 42 crore Jan Dhan accounts of which close to 55% of the accounts are of women.

Modi said that the amount of help the government has provided to women under the National Rural Livelihood Mission is many times more than the previous governments. An unsecured loan of about Rs 4 lakh crore has also been made available to selfhelp groups.