World MSME Day 27th June 2023: Commemorating the MSME Day 2023 on Tuesday, MSME Minister Narayan Rane launched the revamped Champions portal with new elements of technology, localisation and feedback. The new Champions 2.0 portal employs chatbot technology for automated grievance redressal in order to reduce the turnaround time using artificial intelligence, Dr Rajneesh, Additional Secretary and Development Commissioner, MSME Ministry said in a presentation.
Moreover, the portal will be available in 11 languages (Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu) from earlier seven languages to improve user-friendliness and outreach. The portal will also have a real-time feedback mechanism for its analysis.
Launched in June 2020 as a single-window grievance redressal portal for MSMEs, the portal resolved 16,221 grievances in FY23 out of 16,262 grievances received. In the current financial year so far, 5,365 grievances were received, of which 5,206 were resolved.
“Our grievance resolution has been almost 100 per cent,” said Dr Rajneesh.
The portal operates a Central Control Room and 69 State Control Rooms in a hub-and-spoke model to facilitate MSMEs through grievance redressal and handholding. It routes queries as per the nature of the complaint to respective branch/bureau/office heads in the MSME Ministry to attend to them within three days.
Before the Champions portal, as informed by MSME Minister Narayan Rane in the Lok Sabha in March last year, MSME complaints were resolved through the internet grievance monitoring system (IGMS) up to May 31, 2020. IGMS was launched in 2016 and had redressed 15,277 complaints between FY17 and FY21 (May 8, 2020).
As per the operational requirements, the MSME Ministry had earlier expanded the scope of the portal by onboarding 25 ministries/departments/ government institutions, 32 state governments, 58 banks/financial institutions/regional rural banks/state finance corporations, 60 central public sector enterprises and other important organizations like FSSAI, BIS and GeM to address issues of MSMEs.