Agartala, Mar 15 : Deputy chief minister holding the finance and rural development portfolios Jishnu Dev Varma announced on Tuesday that The Tripura Rural Livelihood Mission (TRLM) has recorded a huge success providing bank loans of Rs 320 Cr and comm ty investment of Rs 166 Cr, as well as revolving fund of Rs 17.45 Cr to about 32000 self-help groups (SHGs) in the state so far. The budget for the current fiscal year will be presented on Wednesday. He claimed over 29 lakh households have been brought under the SHG fold in last four years of the BJP government. As many as 1399 village organisations, 35 cluster level federations were promoted during this period. Besides, the setting up of 284 custom hiring centres, altogether 58712 women farmers were promoted under TRLM. “The SHG movement in Tripura was started long back with the support of the central government and an administrative set up was also put in place but everything was very slow and largely dysfunctional. After BJP-IPFT government came to power in 2018, we have given priority to this sector for empowering our women and it started yielding fruits now,” Dev Varma attributed. He further pointed out that SHGs have been playing a pivotal role in strengthening the rural economy and after Narendra Modi led government came to power at the centre it got a boost coupled with skill development activities, entrepreneurship development initiatives and forward market linkages of the products of SHG. In the last seven years, it showed a phenomenal contribution to the rural economy across the country, especially in northeastern states. The core of TRLM financial inclusion and investment strategy is making poor the preferred clients of the banking system and mobilizing bank credit, which facilitates poor households for access to reliable financial services to the poor, Dev Varma said and added, “These include financial literacy, bank account, savings, credit, insurance, remittance, pension and counselling on financial services”. BB RN