Ease of doing business for MSMEs: The registration count on the MSME ministry’s MSME registration portal Udyam has crossed the 1.5-crore mark, over two and a half years after it was launched on July 1, 2020 with the reclassification of MSMEs post the Covid pandemic. The first 50 lakh registrations came in nearly 15 months after the portal’s launch while the next 50 lakhs came in around the following 11 months, hitting the 1-crore count in August last year. The time frame was further narrowed to around seven months for the subsequent 50 lakh registrations.
The growth in registrations assumes significance as Udyam is among the flagship initiatives undertaken by the MSME ministry post-pandemic to formalise the informal units in the MSME sector that comprises around 6.3 crore units in the country, 99 per cent of which are micro.
Also read: Retailers, wholesalers top MSME registrations on Udyam portal: Govt data
“We are working towards bringing the tiniest of the micro enterprises into the formal framework,” MSME Ministry Secretary BB Swain had said highlighting the role of the Udyam portal at the MSME Business Conclave organised by FE Aspire last year.
In fact, to bring micro enterprises, which are connected to the banking ecosystem because of digital transactions but aren’t GST registered, into the formal fold, the ministry had launched a separate Udyam Assist Platform (UAP) in January this year. To register them, banks share the required data of their micro enterprise customers with UAP which validates the data and registers units on the Udyam portal.
As of March 19, 13.3 lakh micro units were registered via UAP on the Udyam portal. The UAP registrations took the total Udyam registration count to 1.63 crore so far with aggregate employment of 10.81 crore. Out of total registrations, 1.57 crore were micro units while 4.52 lakh units were small enterprises and only 40,667 were medium enterprises.
Also read: Over 6,000 MSMEs registered on Udyam portal shut during FY22: MSME Ministry
The Udyam portal had replaced the Udyog Aadhaar Memorandum (UAM) in 2020. According to the MSME ministry’s 2020-21 annual report, UAM had registered only 1.02 crore MSMEs during its years of operation between September 2015 and June 30, 2020.
However, 55,603 Udyam-registered MSMEs had withdrawn or cancelled their registrations as of December 14 since the launch of the portal, according to the data shared by the Minister of State for MSMEs Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma in a written reply in Rajya Sabha in December last year. The reasons cited for withdrawal or cancellation, as per the earlier data shared in July last year, were the shutting down of operations, change of ownership in the business, etc.