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The Maharashtra government will offer a basket of fiscal benefits in terms of interest rate concessions and power tariffs to SME clusters, said Mr Sanjay Sethi, Secretary (Small & Medium Industries) & Development Commissioner (Industries), Government of Maharashtra.
The India SME Leadership Summit on the occasion of its 17th foundation day focused on the need for technological innovation, financial and constructive policy support for the growth and development of the SME sector. The advantages of forming clusters of SME units were also discussed.
Important stakeholders
Emphasising on the need to provide support mechanism to the SMEs, Mr Subir Gokarn, Deputy Governor, RBI said that the entrepreneurs and the government are important stake-holders in this sector and they play a crucial role in making this sector competitive and viable. “Financial problems faced by the SME sector need to be addressed. Banks providing financial assistance to the SMEs need to balance risk with lending activities,” he added.
Speaking on the initiatives already taken to promote the sector, Mr M. Narendra, Chairman of Indian Overseas Bank said that the bank had disbursed Rs 14,000 crore to SMEs in the last fiscal.
“We have opened exclusive SME branches and empowered managers to lend to SMEs.” He also spoke about the importance of credit-rating for the SME sector.
With respect to clusters Mr Gokarn said that organic clusters inherently have huge benefits in the marketing, production and environmental space as they operate collectively and get the benefits of economies of scale.
Area of Concern
Lack of technological innovation was another area of concern for the SME sector. Non-availability of technology will hamper the research and development activities of the SMEs, said experts. One of the initiatives in this direction – iON — is an information technology solution created by TCS for the small and medium enterprises. “iON is a pre-configured hardware, networking and software solution in the third-generation cloud-computing technology. It's a pay-per-use revenue model where the rent is collected on a monthly basis,” said Mr Pankaj Baliga, Vice-President of Tata Consultancy Services.
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