Udyam: Govt’s post-Covid MSME registration portal nears whopping 2-crore mark
Ease of doing business for MSMEs: The number of enterprises registered on the MSME ministry’s MSME registration portal Udyam has neared the 2-crore mark in nearly three years since the launch of the portal on July 1, 2020, with the reclassification of MSMEs after the Covid pandemic. The first 50 lakh registrations on the portal were recorded in nearly 15 months from launch while the next set of 50 lakh registrations came in around the following 11 months, hitting the 1-crore count in August last year. The time frame narrowed further to around seven months for the subsequent 50 lakh registrations on the portal and is expected to shrink to around four-five months to hit the 2-crore mark in the coming few weeks.
The increase in Udyam registrations of MSMEs and other enterprises gain importance as Udyam is among the key programmes launched by the MSME ministry after Covid 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, as per the 73rd round of the National Sample Survey during 2015-16.
As of June 4, 1.96 crore businesses were registered with Udyam certificates, of which 30.9 lakh were informal micro units brought into the formalisation fold through the Udyam Assist Platform (UAP). Overall, 1.89 crore units were micro enterprises, 5.49 lakh were small enterprises and 52,220 were medium enterprises registered, as per data from the portal.
UAP was launched by the ministry in January this year to bring informal micro enterprises, which are connected to the banking ecosystem because of digital transactions but aren’t GST registered, into the formal fold. Banks are required to share the required data of their informal micro enterprise customers with UAP which validates the data and registers units on the Udyam portal.
Also read: PM Modi: States must act proactively towards formalisation of MSMEs
In January itself, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing the state chief secretaries, had called for the formalisation of MSMEs to help them scale. In his address at the second national conference of chief secretaries, PM Modi said, “States must act proactively towards formalisation of MSMEs” along with the need to make finance, technology, market and access for skilling available to MSMEs to become globally competitive.
Meanwhile, in May, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had informed all financial institutions including banks and NBFCs to treat informal micro enterprises registered through the Udyam Assist platform as micro enterprises for classification under the priority sector lending (PSL) norms.