The government’s flagship portal to drive formalisation in the MSME sector, Udyam Registration has crossed the milestone figure of 5 crore registered enterprises. Currently, 5.02 crore MSMEs including informal micro enterprises (IMEs), which are exempted from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime, are registered on the portal.
Out of 5.02 crore MSMEs, 4.93 crore are micro enterprises while small-sized units are only 7.18 lakh and medium enterprises are only 68,072, according to the available data on the portal.
The 5-crore mark is being achieved in a little over four years. Launched on July 1, 2020 to ease registration of MSMEs in the country for access to various benefits including priority lending from financial institutions, the portal has 21.5 crore jobs reported by the MSMEs registered.
Importantly, the government operated the Udyog Aadhaar Memorandum (UAM) and Entrepreneurs Memorandum (EM-II) before UAM for MSME registration.
5 crore registrations in four years gain significance as according to the MSME Ministry’s 2020-21 annual report, 21,96,902 EM-II filings were recorded during the 2007-2015 period while from September 2015 till June 30 2020 (nearly five years), there were 1,02,32,451 (1.02 crore) UAM registrations.
To boost the registration count and bring IMEs into the formal economic fold, the MSME Ministry had launched the Udyam Assist Platform (UAP) in January 2023. The UAP enables IMEs for Udyam certification based on their bank data.
The government had also extended Udyam coverage to retail and wholesale trades, however, the benefits were restricted to priority sector lending by banks. Priority lending refers to the mandatory lending targets set by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for lenders to ensure that certain sectors of the economy including MSME receive adequate credit and financial support.