Kudumbashree, a community-based organisation of neighbourhood groups (NHGs) in Kerala, will now find it easy to raise needed funds thanks to an NHG work management and rating software conceived by the PG Programme students of IIM-Kozhikode.
KT Jaleel, Minister for Local Self Government, launched the software named Shreshta, which is aimed at enhancing the performance of Kudumbashree.
NABARD PARAMETERS
Kudumbashree has been recognised as an effective strategy for empowerment of women in rural as well as urban areas.
The overall empowerment of women is closely linked to economic empowerment, which can leverage recent technological advancements.
Nabard (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development) guidelines list 16 scales or parameters to assess NHGs before providing financial assistance.
However, the incumbent system and workflow in place can assess NHGs against far fewer parameters.
The application developed through Shreshta is capable of assessing nine parameters, on the basis of which suitable credit rating can be given to the NHGs.
It can incorporate more parameters in future. The rating is quite similar to CIBIL score which is given to individuals for creditworthiness.
CREDIT RATING
The rating score will help in two ways. Firstly, Kudumbashree can disburse more funds to units which have a better rating.
Secondly, these credit ratings can be used as an endorsement by NHGs to seek faster disbursements from banks.
The same solution can be potentially extended for generating on-demand credit rating and generating formatted reports and recommendation letters.
The data captured through Kudumbashree’s MIS (management information system) is the input for calculating the rating system.
These include details on thrift, funds disbursement, collection and bank interactions of each NHGs.
The rating is imperative because digital access to funds for NHGs is a bigger challenge after demonetisation of high-value notes.
Similarly, this solution has a higher possibility of better adoption as it directly benefits Kudumbashree’s most important and prevalent business process.
PROJECT LEADERSHIP
The project was rolled out by the Executive PGP students of IIM Kozhikode, who developed the software s part of their social development project.
The project was mentored by Mohammed Shahid Abdulla, Professor, IT and Systems, IIM Kozhikode, and Rahul Krishnan, Thematic Anchor, Livelihoods, Kudumbhashree.
The project team comprised Mridul Vijay (Stark Communications), Mathew TJS (IBS Software Services), Mudit (SunTec Business Solutions), Karthik Pillai (FourNxt Consultants LLP) and Nibu Alias (Sectorqube Technolabs).
According to Minister Jaleel, Kudumbashree relies heavily on manual registers for keeping records of money-lending.
Aligning it with the Digital India Initiative and introducing technology into their working will increase their operational efficiency.
Hari Kishore, Executive Director, Kudumbashree, said Shreshta project would lead to an error-free environment and the rating solution will lead to easy disbursement of loans to the performing NHGs.