State initiates steps to introduce MSME policy

Business Standard, May 28, 2009

The Orissa government proposes to operationalise various provisions of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) development policy 2009 soon.

This pertain to the preparation of exclusive list for small scale products, vendor development, buyer-seller meet, formulation of the venture capital scheme among others. As part of the initiative, the industry department plans to organise a national level trade fair here in the coming winter.

“We have initiated measures to operationalise various provisions in the MSME Development policy 2009 as per industrial policy resolution-2008”, an official associated with the process said.

The small organisations holding trade fair in a smaller scale earlier will be invited to participate in the event, which is proposed to be more comprehensive with separate segments for items like handicrafts, small scale units, service providers, marketing, technology and training.

A four member committee comprising of additional secretary (industries department), managing director, Orissa Small Industries Corporation (OSIC) , director, export promotion and marketing (EPM) and director (handicraft and cottage industries) has been constituted to prepare the ground work for the trade fair.

Similarly, the proposal to implement a venture capital scheme has made substantial headway. The state owned Orissa State Financial Corporation (OSFC) has submitted a draft of the scheme to the industry department and it is being examined. The scheme envisages building a corpus to provide financial assistance to new Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in the form of equity and quasi-equity. As per the proposal, the state government will provide some funds for the corpus and other financial institutions like the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) will be invited to contribute to the corpus.

The eligible new and innovative units will be provided some equity and soft loans at a subsidised rate of interest after due appraisal. Under the scheme, MSMEs winning orders from any organisation can avail raw material on credit from the state-owned Orissa Small Industries Corporation (OSIC), which will recover its money from the organisation later.

On the other hand, to meet the infrastructure needs of MSMEs in the state, exclusive industrial parks are proposed to be set up in locations like Kalinga Nagar, Barbil, Jharsuguda, Sambalpur, Dhenkanal, Angul, Paradeep, Rourkela, Bragarh, Balasore, Dhamra, Gopalpur, Chhatrapur, Raygada, Kalahandi and Choudwar. The proposed industrial parks will come up in major industrial hubs and will have all basic infrastructure facilities like water supply, power, facilities for waste management, testing laboratories and other civic amenities.

The government intends to set up industrial parks closer to special economic zones (SEZs) and the state-owned Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (Idco) has been entrusted with the job of promoting these parks, sources added.