SHGs are under pressure!

SHGs are Self Help Groups of women. The underlying logic of SHG is that it gives women much needed strength (that comes with being together as a group) and SHG becomes a demonstrating agency. Others (meeting, development, finance, govt schemes, education) are all add ons.
There are SHPIs (SHG promoting insitutions, which can be aganwari lady, people from block office, banks, NGOs etc) which help in formation of SHG. The ultimate aim for them is to involve SHGs in some activity (developement or economic) and link them to bank. Linking SHGs to banks is what is called as SHG bank linkage and is kind of microfinance that Nabard always talks about. India has given SHGs and SHG led microfinance to world.
Somebody gave an idea "SHGs are best way to implement schemes", the logic - You work with group of women, you empower them. Government departments took it home. I ridicule this! The only logic people find is that, you easily find women to complete your targets. Well, even if there are bad intentions this logic actually do good to those 15-20 women. The real problem arises when these 15-20 women are target clients for all departments - irrigation, small enterprise/industry, women child care, health department, education, the list is long. It leads to corruption and falsification of facts, far from desired impacts.
And the complexity keeps on increasing.
Now, this group has to avail a loan under SGSY program, The aganwari lady is helping them put on a business (her targets), Dept of small industries are there to tell things (targets), Banks also sometimes get involved in this (SGSY loan target) for getting women ready for SGSY loans. If I were the member of such a group, to whom I would have listened to? And you know sometimes a woman belongs to more than one SHG.
Then there is poaching, one department trying to poach other's SHG. NGOs taking away aganwari lady's SHG.
I got this impression few months back while talking to organizations which work on grassroot.
It hurts when you know people do not care, if SHGs are getting real benefits plus the real of aim of building women - institution is done or not. They just meet targets!