Registration of MSMEs: The government’s online registration portal for MSMEs has crossed the 2.5 crore registration mark, three years and two months after its launch on July 1, 2020. The portal had 2.52 crore registrations including 63.48 lakh micro units registered via the Udyam Assist Platform (UAP) launched in January this year to help lenders onboard micro entrepreneurs such as street vendors, outside the GST framework, on the Udyam platform to benefit from priority sector lending.
Udyam is the only platform by the MSME Ministry authorised for registering micro, small and medium enterprises with up to Rs 250 crore turnover. At the time of filing this report, the portal had an overall 2.45 crore micro enterprises, 5.68 lakh small enterprises and 53,302 medium enterprises, according to the data available on the portal.
The total employment reported by 1.89 crore units (excluding UAP-based registrations) was 13.52 crore, as of September 3, 2023, with 1.38 crore units operating in the services sector and 50.02 lakh in the manufacturing sector. Women employees working with registered units were 3.13 crore.
In terms of exports, only 1.89 lakh were exporting units with an export value of Rs 15.03 lakh crore.
Importantly, to encourage informal micro enterprises, which are not GST-registered, for Udyam registration to access the benefits of priority sector lending, the MSME ministry in May this year had made the Aadhaar authentication for such enterprises voluntary.
Moreover, in July, the ministry had announced an MoU between Udyam and Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises to share data of the registered enterprises on Udyam with the government’s collateral-free loan scheme for micro and small enterprises (MSEs), FE Aspire had reported.
According to a post by MSME Minister Narayan Rane on X (formerly Twitter), both platforms will share the data with each other using API (Application Programming Interface) integration, which is a connection between two or more applications that allow systems to exchange data sources. This will allow the CGT Fund access to the data of MSEs availing the CGT scheme facility across the enterprise and social categories.