Products Made By Self-Help Groups To Be Listed On Centre’s E-Commerce Platform

Women Self Help Groups also referred to as SHG’s is one of the major market operated by rural or village sector women, in order to become financially independent and stable. This, in turn, helps them to lead a good life. But these SHG’s are not able to operate the way they should. The reason being, most of the people are not aware about this market as it is only limited to the boundaries of the village or town.

Taking advantage of this, a lot of middlemen come in to picture and the profit ratio that the SHG women should get is reduced to pennies. The major reason this situation arises is because of the lack of education and knowledge of the digital world amongst these workers.

The Government, in its initiative to take India to a new horizon, is taking new steps each day and a major focus is also laid on improving the lives of the rural parts and regions of the country.

Taking a step forward in this direction, the Rural Development Ministry of India has proposed to provide a wider market for the products manufactured by women Self Help Groups by listing them on the center’s e-commerce platforms, as revealed by the sources on Sunday. Not only that, the Government has also decided to take some more steps in this direction by providing all necessary support to SHG’s like branding, packaging, pricing, etc. to make the products more marketable.

With the proposal of this strategy, products made or manufactured by the SHG’s will just be a click away, same as Amazon, Flipkart or other e-commerce platforms. As per one of the senior officials of the ministry, the groups or the products will be listed on the center’s e-commerce portal, Government e-Marketplace (GeM).

“This step will help in a big way in making women in villages financially independent and in overall improvement of the rural economy, officials in the ministry said.”

If we look at the current statistics, there are approximately 58.5 lakh Self Help Groups under the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojna- National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM), with almost over 6 crore women as members or part of this mission.

It is expected that Ministries and Departments under the Central Government and Public Sector Undertakings (PSU’s) may start the procurement from the GeM platform which is currently managed by and is under the control of the Commerce Ministry.

Talking about GeM, it was launched back in August 2016 in order to increase transparency and efficiency in the process of public procurement. Currently, GeM has almost 3.36 lakh sellers doing business on the platform. Out of which 74,240 are small and micro sellers. And looking at the total transaction value so far it is somewhere around Rs. 47,612 crores.

As proposed by honorable finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, going forward, the expected increase in GeM’s turnover would be somewhere around Rs.3 Lakh Crores.

So, looking at all the proposals and the necessary steps taken by the Government, the proposal is expected to show a great boom in the Indian economy by making SHG’s digitally effective and allowing them to attract more audience/buyers that will automatically help raise the standard and condition of Rural India.