How to revive hurt MSME sector post lockdown?

Chennai: The Covid-19 pandemic has affected the economy badly. With lockdowns after lockdown, many businesses had to down shutters and laid off employees.

Revival of MSMEs is one of the biggest challenges that India faces as there are 6.34 crore Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises (MSMEs), every single business has been affected in various degrees. It is said that 99.5 per cent of all MSMEs fall in the micro category.

Recently, Chartered Accountant and an ESG evangelist Shailesh Haribhakti, Entrepreneur and Convenor of Consortium of Indian Associations (CIA), K E Raghunathan and Global Strategic and Economic Consultant, Advisor and Thought Leader, Ram Kapadia prepared a blueprint for the revival of the MSME sector.

The article claimed that 50 per cent of India’s MSME may go bankrupt as the country grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic and that the MSME’s need to be supported in two ways through Fiscal and Tactical.

Some relief for the MSME sector suggested are: Drive working capital and long term financial flows for MSMEs for the long tenure, Create a multi-sovereign fund singularly focused on MSMEs, Any payment due from government entities (center, state, or local) or from larger businesses to a company with annual revenue under Rs 50 crore, must be cleared or paid in 15 days.

They also highlighted tactics such as digitise, disrupt models, deceptively gain market reputation and so on.

The authors believed that the lockdown should be lifted completely so that entire supply chains get re-established.

“Government should focus on global marketing for reviving MSMEs by engaging with EXIM banks worldwide. We need to get back to our ‘free-market’ way of doing things. The government’s time, focus, and energy should be singularly focused on reviving demand and thus restarting the paused economic cycle”, the blueprint said.

In a bid to embrace technology, one of the tactics suggested was to create an e-marketplace for MSMEs to provide a direct interface between buyers and sellers like e-commerce giants Alibaba and Amazon and to some extent GeM portal.