The growing social awareness across the globe has brought a number of issues to the fore among which gender quality and empowerment of women are very significant. Discrimination against women in the form of male-female differentiation constitutes the core of the gender-biased system. The education is the biggest liberating force and the rise in the levels of education which nourishes progressive outlook and the advent of industrialization and modernization have effected a sea change in the attitudes and thinking pattern of the people. The empowerment is not essentially political alone in fact; political empowerment will not succeed in the absence of economic empowerment. The scheme of micro financing through Self Help Groups (SHGs) has transferred the real economic power in the hands of women and has considerably reduced their dependence on men. This has helped in empowerment of women and building self-confidence

The Self Help Groups experience over the past twenty five years offers a unique case of trying to explore and understand the issues of women's Education and empowerment and the inter linkages there of in different regional and rural contexts within India. It offers an example of the importance of empowerment of women as a critical precondition to facilitate greater inclusion of women and their daughters into education further, it provides an alternative paradigm to women's mobilization as the principal strategy for women's development.

In this paper an attempt has been made to describe the self-help groups, progress under Micro Finance during 2011-12, Overall Progress under SHG-Bank Linkage for last 3 years, Development and policy initiatives and offered conclusions