The SHG-based micro-finance programme for income generation and empowerment is extremely popular and has a wide reach in India. SHG s have been playing a key mediating role to empower a socially, economically, and politically deprived section comprising mostly women. Scholars have investigated the phenomenon of SHG, but largely from development perspectives. The present paper is an earnest and novel attempt to examine the evolution and development of the phenomenon of SHG in the eastern Indian state of Odisha from the social movement perspective. Based on both secondary and primary data, it discusses whether the phenomenon is a social movement at all and examines the applicability of resource mobilisation theory to study it.