'India's inclusive growth depends on success of SMEs'

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Saurabh Gupta | 18 Jul, 2013
India's inclusive growth is totally depending on the success of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and manufacturing, Member Secretary, National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC) Ajay Shankar said Wednesday.

"The success of India's inclusive growth is dependent on the success of SMEs and is dependent on the success of the manufacturing," said Shankar, while addressing the launch of '1,000 Visionary SME (VSME) Programme' by NMCC, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA) in the national capital.

"India's success will depend on the success of SMEs. There is only the SMEs who will create the jobs we need, it is only the SMEs who drop the poverty we need to cater," he said

"From last fifteen years we are saying that we want inclusive growth, but this will not going to happen unless we succeed in manufacturing and succeed in the vision of the national manufacturing policy for creating a 100 million jobs. And most of those jobs will actually come from the SMEs," he added.

He also said that when he looked at the SMEs or manufacturing sector in India, it was a mixed picture. "There is story of extraordinary success and there is also the other half of the story of great difficulty."

Commenting on the '1000 VSME programme', which is an extension of an earlier scheme to 'transform' enterprises at the consumer and supplier level, he said, "I have a feeling of great pride, feeling of great optimism and confidence about the future of our country and this would not have happened, unless I had been here for last few hours. I think what we have witnessed here today, will transform India in coming years."

With the success of VSME programme over three years (2010-2013), NMCC, CII and JICA decided to expand and reach out to transform 1000 SMEs under the India-Japan joint Technical cooperation Agreement, said Sinya Ejima, Chief Representative, Japan International Cooperation Agency.

When asked about the details of the programme, on the sidelines of the event Principal Advisor, CII, Sarita Nagpal told SME Times, "The programme is the visionary SME programme, which is designed to help customer company along with its suppliers to work through a hand holding exercise over one year to transform itself. So to transform the Tier-1 and Tier-2 together over a one year hand holding period.".

'So in three years we targeting 1000 SMEs up till March 2016," she added.