The home loan provider, LIC Housing Finance is seeing a trend with its home loan scheme for women, ‘Bhagyalakshmi'. In the January-March quarter, around 40 per cent of the loans sanctioned by the company were to women, said a top official.

According to Mr. V. K. Sharma, MD and CEO of LIC Housing Finance said that of the Rs 7,842 crore home loans sanctioned in the quarter, women borrowers, numbering 13,700, accounted for Rs 3,154 crore.

"In the first half of the last financial year, we had conducted a study on women borrowers, who accounted for about 15 per cent of our total customer base of eight lakh.

"We found, to our surprise, that their credit quality is much better. So, we introduced an exclusive home loan scheme - Bhagyalakshmi - for them," said Mr. Sharma. The average loan size under the scheme, which was launched on January 8, works out to about Rs 23 lakh.

Borrowers under the Bhagyalakshmi scheme also get 0.25 per cent interest rebate for the entire tenure of the home loan. The rate of interest is fixed for the first two years from the date of the first disbursement and is floating thereafter.