In an effort to support rural entrepreneurs of India, the Centre on Saturday said it would think of giving loans under the Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency (MUDRA) Yojana of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Speaking on the ‘e-Commerce Services: Enhancing Rural Entrepreneurship through Common Services Centres (CSCs), Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that he would request the Prime Minister and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for the purpose.
“CSCs need to be funded, and being small-time entrepreneurs, they are fully qualified to get banking assistance under the MUDRA scheme. I will take up the matter with the Finance Ministry and the Prime Minister as CSCs will play a major role to make Digital India successful,” Prasad said.
The Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) was launched in April, under which the overall loan disbursement target has been set at around ₹1.22 lakh crore for this financial year.
He said the CSCs are very small-scale initiatives and MUDRA is for such institutions and therefore, people who want to start such service points but do not have any funding, MUDRA can help them start their micro-ventures.
CSCs are information and communications technology enabled service delivery points at the village level for delivery of government, financial, social and private services such as applying online passports, land record, digital locker and Aadhaar cards.
The Minister also launched a Handbook on e-Commerce through CSCs and asked the e-Commerce companies to help linking CSCs as far as possible because 60 per cent of online markets are served in rural areas.