Bikky Khosla | 10 Apr, 2018
In
his Budget Speech for
Financial Year 2015-16, Finance
Minister Arun Jaitley proposed the creation of a Micro Units
Development Refinance Agency (MUDRA) Bank, with a corpus of Rs.20,000
crore, and credit guarantee corpus of Rs.3,000 crore. Following this,
Prime Minister Modi later launched the bank on April 8, at a function
at Vigyan Bhavan in the national capital. Since then, three years
have passed, and now we may look back what we have achieved.
On
the occasion of completion
of
three years of the
flagship programmeâs
launch,
the Prime Minister last
week tweeted
that
the
Mudra Yojana was furthering a spirit of enterprise and self-reliance
among youth and women. "...I am delighted to see how Mudra
Yojana has brought prosperity in the lives of many," he said and
also invited the beneficiaries of the scheme to share their success
stories, adding that he would meet some of them at his official
residence on April 11.
According
to latest available data, 3,48,80,924
Mudra accounts have been opened in 2015-16, 3,97,01,047
in
2016-17 and 3,69,03,984 in 2017-18.
The sanctioned amounts
in these three years stand at Rs 1,37,449.27
crore, Rs 1,80,528.5 crore and Rs 1,81,901.12 crore, respectively.
The figures look good.
Additionally,
it is encouraging to see the steps taken under the scheme over these
years, such as intensive
publicity campaigns, simplification of application forms, Credit
Guarantee Scheme, refinance from MUDRA Ltd, weekly video conferences
to monitor the progress, etc.
In
2013, the
NSSO survey found that India
has
5.77 crore small business units, mostly individual proprietorships,
which run small manufacturing, trading or services activities. Most
of these enterprises are owned by people belonging to Scheduled
Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Classes. Only 4% of such
units get institutional finance. To address this concern, the Mudra
scheme has been designed, and
the
results seem positive,
as reflected by official figures.
I
invite your opinions.
