Credit and Finance for MSMEs: The Modi government’s Standup India scheme, which facilitated bank loans between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 1 crore to scheduled caste (SC) or scheduled tribe (ST) and women entrepreneurs, has sanctioned 1,11,619 loan applications involving Rs 24,985.27 crore as of March 2, 2021, according to the data shared by the Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs Anurag Singh Thakur in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday. The scheme was launched on April 5, 2016, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to support at least one SC/ST and woman borrower per bank branch for setting up a greenfield enterprise in the manufacturing, services, or trading sector.
Pursuant to the announcement made in the Budget speech this year by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, the margin money requirement for loans under this scheme was reduced from up to 25 per cent to up to 15 per cent. Also, activities allied to agriculture were included in the scheme. The scheme has onboarded over 300 lenders with over 1.5 lakh branches connected to the scheme.
“The government has taken various steps towards effective implementation of the Scheme. These, inter alia, include provision for submission for online applications by potential borrowers through an online portal, handholding support, intensive publicity campaign, simplified loan application form, credit guarantee scheme, campaign for target group through dedicated weekly programmes etc.,” Thakur said in his reply.
As of March 2020, the states with the highest number of accounts and amount sanctioned were Andhra Pradesh in which Rs 1,284.11 crore was sanctioned across 5,313 accounts. Similarly, 6,292 entrepreneurs in Gujarat secured Rs 1,837.7 crore in loan, Uttar Pradesh saw 11,455 entrepreneurs raising Rs 2,317.89 crore, Maharashtra had 6,834 accounts and Rs 1,577.05 crore sanctioned in loan.
Meanwhile, bank credit deployed to micro and small enterprises in December 2020 had increased 6.6 per cent to Rs 11.31 lakh crore from Rs 10.61 lakh crore during the year-ago period. The December year-on-year (YoY) credit growth to MSEs was also up from 6.1 per cent YoY growth in November 2020, according to the data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Banks had deployed Rs 11.22 lakh crore to MSEs in November down from Rs 11.25 lakh crore in October.
