Dr Keya Ghosh: "Community-Embedded Financial Cooperativism: Reconstructing SHG Institutions through Tagorean Rural Thought"

Community-Embedded Financial Cooperativism: “Reconstructing SHG Institutions through Tagorean Rural Thought”

Self-Help Groups (SHGs) have emerged as significant institutional mechanisms for financial inclusion, women’s empowerment, and rural livelihood development in India. However, their contemporary architecture remains predominantly credit-oriented, emphasizing savings mobilization, bank linkage, loan repayment, and micro-enterprise development, while giving comparatively limited attention to social cohesion, collective asset formation, participatory governance, cultural regeneration, and ethical economic practices. This paper addresses this conceptual limitation by revisiting the cooperative and rural reconstruction ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and examining their relevance to contemporary SHG institutions. Drawing on Tagore’s writings, including Swadeshi Samaj and Atmashakti, as well as the rural reconstruction experiments at Sriniketan, the study develops a conceptual framework termed Community-Embedded Financial Cooperativism (CEFC). The framework reconceptualizes SHGs not merely as financial intermediaries but as community-embedded cooperative institutions founded upon trust, self-strength, shared responsibility, participatory governance, collective ownership, and cultural-educational integration. It further distinguishes transactional trust from moral trust and conceptualizes social trust as a form of foundational, pre-monetary capital upon which sustainable financial cooperation can develop. The paper proposes a multidimensional approach to SHG performance assessment encompassing financial sustainability, social cohesion, participatory governance, collective asset creation, and cultural-educational development. By connecting Tagorean moral economy with contemporary cooperative and rural development theory, the study contributes an indigenous and interdisciplinary perspective to SHG research. It argues that the long-term sustainability of rural institutions depends not only on access to finance but also on the capacity of communities to build collective agency, ethical economic relationships, and shared social assets. The CEFC framework therefore offers a theoretical basis for transforming SHGs from credit-led microfinance groups into broader institutions of sustainable rural reconstruction.

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