UAP for registration of IMEs: The government in January this year had launched the Udyam Assist Platform(UAP) – a formalisation project by the MSME ministry. The platform enables Udyam registration of micro enterprises such as street vendors and others, which are informal in nature as they are not registered under Goods and Services Tax (GST), to benefit from priority sector lending (PSL) by banks. The primary objective of UAP is to bring a large number of such informal micro enterprises (IMEs) into the formal economic fold with the help of designated agencies (DAs).
DAs are banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), microfinance institutions (MFIs) or other agencies approved by the MSME ministry that can authorise one of its officers to act as their nodal officer on UAP. After registering on the UAP, the DA users get access to the portal to upload data of IMEs transacting with them.
Importantly, while IMEs are not GST-registered units, they certainly undertake banking transactions. Their transaction history helps banks understand their liquidity and repayment capacity for loans raised. This surrogate data is helpful in providing these units loans and help address the larger issue of lack of access to affordable credit in the MSME sector.
IMEs are not required to share any documents for registration with DAs separately. DAs have to share the required information as available with them of IMEs on UAP.
Moreover, IMEs cannot directly register themselves on UAP. They are required to reach out to their bank, NBFC or MFI for registration. The UAP processes and validate the data submitted by DAs to generate the Udyam registration number and UAC for the enterprise. The registration number and the certificate is then available for download to both DA as well as the enterprise from UAP. The URN generated for enterprises via UAP is of an exclusive number series called the Udyam-I.
For the uninitiated, the MSME ministry in May this year had made the Aadhaar authentication for IMEs voluntary in order to encourage them for Udyam registration and access PSL benefits, the ministry had said in a notification.
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The notification followed the proposal submitted by the MSME ministry to the central government for the Aadhaar authentication “in the interest of good governance, preventing leakage of public funds, promoting ease of living of residents and enabling better access to services for them.” The central government had authorised the ministry for the Aadhaar authentication of IMEs in March this year.
As per the latest data available on the Udyam portal, 30.93 lakh IMEs had registered for Udyam via UAP as of June 27.