摘要：Poverty and unemployment are the major problems of any under developed countries, to which India is noexception. The rate of growth of women employment in India is very low. This is because of the low growth rate of new andproductive employment. The more attractive scheme with less effort is "Self Help Group" (SHG). It is a tool to remove povertyand improve the women entrepreneurship and financial support in India. A Self Help Group is a small economically homogeneousaffinity group of the rural poor voluntarily coming together to save a small amount regularly, which is deposited in a commonfund to meet members emergency needs and to provide collateral free loans decided by the group. Self Help Group s enhancethe equality of status of women as participants, decision-makers and beneficiaries in the democratic, economic, social andcultural spheres of life. The present paper is mainly focusing on the Self Help Group formation, women entrepreneurship andeconomic empowerment of women after them joining Self Help Groups in YSR district, Andhra Pradesh (A. P.) India. YSRdistrict (Kadapa district) is one of the pioneering districts for the implementation of the Development of Women and Childrenin Rural Areas (DWCRA) as pilot project in the Andhra Pradesh state along with Srikakulam and Adilabad. Presently there are21 Mandals in YSR district of Andhra Pradesh consisting of 35,338 Self Help Groups. Of these, the best five villages, Kodur,Ramapuram, Sidhout, Yerraguntla and T. Sundupalli were selected for this study, because the SHGs in these villages werefunctioning in a very successful manner. Therefore, these villages were selected for the present study. There are 43275 membersfrom 3756 Self Help Groups in YSR district. Among them, a total of 200 respondents were selected based on 40 members fromeach village of the selected five villages by using convenient sampling method
关键词：Self Help Groups. Women Empowerment. Economic Development. Poor. Villages
