Micro finance through Self Help Group (SHG) has been recognized internationally as the modern tool to combat poverty and for rural development. The SHG movement has come of age after nearly two decades of experimentation. Its initial success has attracted considerable attention of development practitioners, policy makers, fund providers, academicians, researchers and even corporate bodies. The SHGs today have become a vehicle to pursue diverse developmental agendas and even for the profit motive. To avert such a situation, growth with quality has became the paramount agenda of today among different stakeholders, as there is an over reaching concern about sustainability of the SHG movement in India. In other words, the proliferation of SHG has posed a serious challenge to sustain this movement by maintaining quality of SHGs and hence, the quality assessment of SHGs is now being considered as a key concern. But the assessment tools are devised by different agencies for different purposes and different sets of users. An effort is made in this paper to make a comparative analysis of the two selected quality assessment tools of SHGs and key issues impending in the growth of SHGs and their normal practices. It is evidenced in this paper that the two separate assessment tools i.e. NABARD & MYRADA shows the different languages about the quality or grades of selected SHGs in the study area. However, it is concluded that some of the possible reasons for and possible implications of such grades differences. However, the study suggested the need for developing common understanding on SHG quality assessment

Keyword: Micro finance; Quality parameter; Quality assessment ; SHG-bank linkage programme; Self Help Groups;