MSME Ministry to integrate small businesses with big enterprises through facilitation centres
These centres are planned to be set up at block levels, and will help disseminate information to micro and small enterprises and detect issues faced by them.
The Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) is planning to set up enterprise facilitation centres across the country to make MSMEs more competitive and help them integrate with big enterprises, said MSME ministry's additional secretary Ram Mohan Mishra.
He added that these centres are planned to be set up at block levels, and will help disseminate information to micro and small enterprises and detect issues faced by them.
The ministry is also working on improving the capacity of enterprises that exist at the lower rung of the supply chain, so that they can organically join the chain and supply their material by improving quality and becoming price competitive, Mishra added.
"We are trying to integrate big and small enterprises to facilitate the value chain," he said.
"Services are available in market but others don't know... [about them], and we are working on developing enterprise facilitation centres at block level for information dissemination and diagnosis of troubles. The main focus is clustering," he said.
Mishra made the statement while addressing a workshop on social entrepreneurship organised by the MSME Development Institute and Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India in Gandhinagar.
"The government is more focussed on facilitation, because markets move at their own pace. We facilitate in such a way so as to reduce the cost and upgrade quality, so that the products get accepted in the market," Mishra said.
According to him, the government's effort was to make the entire ecosystem symmetrical so that the overall cost goes down, quality improves, and MSMEs can be integrated into the supply chain, he said.
He also listed down seven aspects the ministry is trying to help small enterprises fine-tune: human capacity development, knowledge services, access to finance, technology, infrastructure, market access, and ease of doing business.
This will help reduce risk factor for the enterprise, which will in turn help them get funding from banks, he added.
Mishra made the statement less than a week after Nitin Gadkari took charge of the MSME Ministry and said the ministry will work with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry to look at the possibility for MSMEs to locally manufacture goods which are currently being imported by India.
