The Union Ministry for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the World Bank for investing Rs 2,200 crore to set up training centres for MSME sector across India by 2017, Minister of State for MSME, Haribhai Parthibhai Chaudhury said at an ASSOCHAM event.
We will also monitor if the money disbursed by the Ministry has reached the target person, said Chaudhury while inaugurating an ASSOCHAM conference on ‘Startup Integration in MSME sector.’
Saudi Arabia is likely to invest up to Rs two lakh crore in India, it is a confidential matter, but since we have opened our defence and aviation sectors for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) we hope to get significant advantage of the same in MSME sector, said the Minister.
Highlighting that the government will soon bring a project for promoting honeybee keeping, he said that Ministry had taken various steps like – making databank, introducing credit guarantee scheme, barcode, enabling online complaint and other such initiatives during the course of past two years.
Earlier in his address, a top MSME Ministry official informed that the government was working towards making the sector ready for GSTN (goods and services tax network) and make the sector tax compliant.
We are working to make MSMEs GSTN-ready and we need the support of various associations to see how the sector can take advantage of the new tax reform which is going to be historic, start up or no start up you have to be tax compliant, said S.N. Tripathi, Additional Secretary & Development Commissioner, MSME Ministry.
He said that the MSME Ministry had notified a framework to enable an entrepreneur to demand restructuring of his loan due to various changes.
A framework has been notified by the Ministry of MSME for quick restructuring of loans if the banks are convinced, RBI has also conquered it and in fact all banks have been mandated to create a committee at the branch level with representatives from state government and other institutions, said Tripathi.
He said that MSME Ministry was working towards nurturing academia and entrepreneurs’ budding ideas. Our ministry is working with about 202 engineering colleges and every year we get 100-150 ideas from each college and out of these till date we have nurtured about 600 ideas of which almost 25 per cent have been commercialised.
We want to commercialise such ideas, we are in talks with some investors – venture capitalists and angel investors and we have succeeded in this behalf as about 100 of the 750 ideas have been commercialised and some of these have clocked transaction and turnover of Rs 10-12 crore so we support good ideas in terms of what we call is incubation, said Tripathi.
He said that the Ministry was working in the domain of start up, scale up and even set up categories.
The top official also said that the MSME Ministry was working on framework to revive the industries that have been rendered inoperational or have been shut down, to unlock their potential.
We want to create framework to revive industries that have been shut, the banks are working in this behalf as per government’s direction as they have made a committee for corrective action plan whereby an entrepreneur can approach banks for restructuring of loan due to change in technology, management or any other foreseen or unforeseen change on his own and not as per the bank’s terms, said Tripathi.
He said that considering cash flow based lending is a problem for MSMEs, so banks are working in this direction as per government’s direction.
He also emphasised upon the need to bring about more awareness regarding intellectual property right (IPR) in MSME sector.
We are promoting awareness about IPR and how to file patents through about 32 institutions which includes chambers, industry bodies, colleges and others, said Tripathi.
Source: Business Standard
Image Courtesy: NDTV
