Group work as a method of social work came to India with the introduction of professional social work education in 1936, a decade after it was acknowledged as formal method of practice in the West. Even though there is evidence of the group approach being used in various contexts – in delivering charity services, imparting religious education through oral tradition, in mobilising people for the freedom struggle against the British, in social reform strategies as in the Sarvodaya and Bhoodan movements. However, there is very little documentation or hardly any theorisation based on it. All the schools of social work in India teach a course/paper in social group work (alternatively titled as “social work with groups”) at both the graduate and the postgraduate levels. There was a brave attempt to develop some indigenous materials in group work by the then United Nations Social Welfare and Development Centre for Asia and the Pacific and the Association of Schools of Social Work in 1979. Compared to casework and community organisation, contributions in developing indigenous materials on group work could be traced back to the 1960s. The Association of Schools of Social Work jointly with the Technical Cooperative Mission (USA) laid down minimum standards for group work practice acted a benchmark to the developments in India. VD. Mehta (1987) and Helen Joseph (1997), two social