The Urban cooperative movement is India is a century old. This sector plays a vital role in bringing about the socio-economic changes in urban and semi-urban areas. In Urban areas, Urban Credit Societies including Women Credit Societies play important roles in extending banking facilities and issue diversified loans to the members generating self-employment and man power through issue of consumption of loans, housing loan, loan in brick-fields, small artisans and other industrial loans etc. There are over 20 million members of urban cooperative banks in India making it in terms of membership, the largest cooperative system in the world. It is a vast sector comprising over 1850 Urban Banks and around 40,000 credit societies. Even with this impressive numbers of banks and credit societies the share of cooperative banking sector in the entire banking system in India is about 5%.

The objective of Urban Credit Institutions is to give small traders, artisans, factory workers and other access to institutional credit Apart from that, these banks have also been rendering services by way of mobilizing deposits .