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In the passing away of Mr D.E. Ramakrishnan, the small scale sector of the country has lost a great champion of its cause.
Mr Ramakrishnan, President, Industrial and Financial Reconstruction Association for Small and Tiny Enterprises (IFRASTE) and Member, National Board for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (NBMSME), Ministry of MSME, Govt. of India, New Delhi, succumbed to a heart attack on Thursday.
Mr Ramakrishnan, 53, was a man gifted with a keen sense of humour, never missed at an opportunity of letting out a throaty chuckle at the irony of a big man championing small-scale sector.
Journalists in Chennai will miss the long reaction statements that IFRASTE would put after Budgets, Credit Policy and other such announcements that had any impact on the small industry. The statements, despite repeated requests from the Press, were typically long, because Mr Ramakrishnan had a lot to say, both in terms of form and substance. For, he was never satisfied with the way the small industry is treated in India. His basic point was that all the policies tailored for the small-scale sector benefited only “the top three percentile” units, while thousands of others languished from neglect.
Obviously it was his ability to articulate, quote chapter and verse and reel out facts and figures without having to refer to a scrap of paper that got him placed in practically any committee of working group that had anything to do with the small industry. For instance, he was a member of the Planning Commission's Steering Committee on Village and Small Enterprises; the Planning Commission's Steering Committee on Labour, Employment and Manpower; the State Advisory Committee of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Regulatory Commission; and the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises' Task Force on Enterprise Development in the Unorganised Sector.
Journalists would share the loss of Mr Ramakrishnan with his family and the small scale industry, as he was, apart from being a good friend, also a major information resource. He is survived by his mother, wife, and two sons.
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