MSMEs comprising 51 million units and producing diverse items form the backbone of the industrial landscape. As the world is gearing up for Industry 4.0, the MSME sector needs to pay serious attention to manufacturing high quality and technological products, said Giriraj Singh, Minister of State for MSMEs (I/C). He was speaking at the 14th Global MSME Business Summit 2017- ‘Fostering Growth through Partnerships’ organized by Confederation of Indian Industry in partnership with Ministry of MSME and Department of Economic Affairs at New Delhi.
Highlighting the role of ‘Zero Effect, Zero Defect’ in MSME sector, the honorable minister emphasized that technologies like 3D printing can help in reducing cost and time for MSMEs. Innovation is essential for competitiveness and to acquire this it is essential to understand and adopt emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) etc. which are going to define the future course for the industry, he added.
Given that more than 60 percent of India’s population still lives in rural areas, it is equally important to tap the entrepreneurship potential of MSMEs in the agricultural sector as well and bring in value addition in agro-based industries, the minister emphasized.
On exploring SMEs’ partnership opportunities with other countries, Dr. Arun Kumar Panda, Secretary, Ministry of MSME emphasized on the need for information sharing and bridging gaps between countries and sharing the best practices in the areas of credit availability, quality assurance and creating an ecosystem for MSMEs by aligning “Process, Prices, People”(PPP) to make process more efficient, and prices more competitive.
Panda also spoke on creating an incentive system for upward graduation from micro to small to medium enterprises so as to enable them to achieve economies of scale and incentivizing such graduation based on employment and wealth creation.
Following the ‘Khadi for Fashion’ call of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Ministry of MSME has planned to associate about five crore female villagers to charkha (spinning wheel).