J&K government announced fund for entrepreneurship development

The Jammu and Kashmir government announced an initial corpus fund for entrepreneurship development in the state. Finance Minister Abdur Rahim Rather in his first budget speech presented in the Assembly earmarked Rs 25 crores for this purpose. This amount is being kept at the disposal of Jammu and Kashmir Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI) which will further the agenda.

Mr Rather in his speech made the intentions of government abundantly clear saying “Centrally sponsored schemes are generally linked to motivated and prospective entrepreneurs. EDI is asked to offer a package which apart from sensitization, training and consultancy inputs shall include an incentive in the form of non refundable seed money to enable prospective entrepreneurs to kick start their ventures and make their projects bankable”.

He said that in order to achieve this goal the Entrepreneurship Development Fund (EDF) has been created. Following this a well conceived scheme will be framed up for the prospective, motivated, trained and provisionally registered first generation entrepreneurs who can enter into agriculture, horticulture, floriculture, food processing and medicinal plants cultivation.

EDF is bound to revolutionize the concept of entrepreneurship in the state. Its simple purpose is to provide principle amount or margin money to young entrepreneurs who generally would call it a day after getting trained of sensitized from EDI. Not only this, but a large chunk of funds from National Minorities and Finance Development Corporation (NMDFC) is to be channelised through EDI. This was earlier done through Women’s Development Corporation and SC/ST Corporation in which latter has failed to lift the required amount of loans. Under this Corporation controlled by Government of India, the EDI will now give loans to prospective entrepreneurs on a very low interest of 6 percent upto Rs 5 lakh as against standing interest rate of more than 13 percent from other banks.