MSMEs need cheaper credit, better services: Niti Aayog

New Delhi: Niti Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar on Thursday said there is a need to re-look at public policies for small, medium and solo entrepreneurs so that highest standards of services reach them and they also get access to cheaper credit.

He also said women need to be given special attention on nutrition and education, as these are important for them to become successful entrepreneurs.

"I think there is a huge need for financial sector reforms, re-calibration…there is a huge supply bottleneck of credit in the financial system for small, medium and solo enterprises," Kumar said at an event here.

He said that often, it happens that these people borrow money at a high cost of three per cent per month and there is a need to see what can be done in this area using technology.

"We need to see how to create the culture of bringing angel investors for these small enterprises, how to bring technology.

We have to see what could be public policy steps for ensuring that the small, medium and solo enterprises have access to the highest and most-developed forms of services that they need. We need to focus on our policy," Kumar said.

Services such as access to credit, technology, market and information are readily available to the formal sector but not to the informal sector, he said.

"At the moment, there is nothing like that (access of services to the informal sector). As pointed out in the last economic census, we had 6 million economic units and 50 per cent of those are small, very small in the informal sector without any access to anything in the formal sector and, therefore, they employ only 13 per cent of the total employable," Kumar said.

He added that it is good to dream about the fact that 50 per cent of the gross domestic product would come from MSMEs but at the moment, we are too far away," He said the Indian entrepreneurs are the best in the world but they face lack of services that a developed state can provide.