How a conference hall packed to its capacity with lanyard-wearing executives need not be a gloomy gabfest but a truly engaging, hugely productive, new knowledge-sharing exercise was palpable at the just concluded meet organised by Financial Express in Hyderabad.
As part of the ongoing series of Emerging Business Growth Workshops held across different cities by Financial Express, a meet was held in Hyderabad on Wednesday, July 31. An initiative by FE Aspire, it is focussed on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises and involving many MSME entrepreneurs and MSME associations, lenders and technology players, the participants were in for several insightful sessions. Setting the tone was Jayesh Ranjan, special chief secretary, industry and IT, government of Telangana. He announced that a new MSME policy by the state was ready and awaiting a cabinet approval at its proposed meeting on August 1st.
Sharing some glimpses of the new policy and what to expect from the state, he said, the new policy goes beyond trying to address the traditional two major challenges facing the sector – availability of credit and access to technology. “While drafting the policy, we engaged in a huge consultative exercise with all the key stakeholders and after 125 meetings, surveys and visits to several MSME clusters, problem areas were placed in six buckets needing suitable measures to address them,” he said. These were access to credit, technology, space or land availability for setting up the units, access to skilled labour, suitable raw material supply and access to markets. The new policy, he said, addresses each of these with specific measures, including conditions when large and mega industrial units had to procure from MSMEs. The policy was also laying emphasis with specific measures to help upgrade machine and digital technologies. Arrangements are also to be made by the government with regard large technology providers with bulk licences that could help the MSMEs get access to modern technology. The MAMEs would also be given a menu of modern technologies available with corresponding cost and productivity implications and given the investment payback periods involved, financial incentives are to be shared. These are to be called ‘Yantram funds’ with the word derived from Sanskrit for machine or mechanical devices.
Many MSMEs hailed some of the pathbreaking measures while eagerly now awaiting the policy details. The FE workshop also had a keynote address by Samriddhi Bhattacharya, director, small business at Dell India. There was also a great deal of brainstorming and idea sharing at the panel discussion on ‘Democratising Credit Access for MSMEs” . It had MSME veterans like K Rama Devi, president, Association of Lady Entrepreneurs of India, S Glory Swarupa, Director General, National Institute for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Hyderabad, Vemuru Chandramouli, General Manager, SIDBI among other leading speakers.
The workshop participants were also treated to a Masterclass on ‘Building Cyber Vigilance’ by Kalidas TC, Services Specialist, Cyber Security at Dell Technologies. That apart there was also a session on accelerating MSME digital growth story. It was held by Rajeshkumar Sitaraman, VP-Cluster Enterprise Head, South, VI Business. The evening concluded with a felicitation of MSMEs by Sandeep Soni, Senior Assistant Editor, Financial Express Digital and a networking high tea. The workshop was organised by Financial Express with Dell Technologies as presenting partner, VI Business as the Digital Transformation Partner and SIDBI as the associate partner.