While Odisha has made a quantum jump in number of accounts in small enterprises, the commercial banks are intriguingly going slow in providing them the much needed credit support.
While by March 31, 2018, there were 1.52 lakh small enterprises accounts, it has made a huge jump with 7.90 lakh accounts by March 31, 2019.
Top administrators in the MSME sector are astonished over such a huge and mindboggling rise in small enterprises in the State.
However, bankers are keeping the loan application on Prime Minister’s Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) pending for months together. Such action by various bankers is posing as a stumbling block for generation of employment and creating bottleneck for small and micro sector growth.
This issue was raised in the recently held State Level Bankers’ Committee (SLBC) meeting and bankers were asked by the State authorities to speed up credit approval and loan disbursement.
Senior officers in the Department of MSME (DoMSME) have expressed concern for 4,511 pending PMEGP proposals and have urged the bankers, either to sanction or reject the proposals, preferably within 30 days from the date of application.
As the bankers are just keeping the applications pending and not taking a decision on crowding of applications, they are posing a problem for the department.
The DoMSME is not able to send revised applications and crowding of applications is resulting in poor quality of scrutiny. With crowding of applications, bankers are not going for qualitative scrutiny, both method and pace of scrutiny of applications are not up to the mark, pointed out a senior officer.
The PMEGP is the flagship programme of the Government of India to generate employment opportunities by setting small and micro enterprises in rural and urban areas of the State. The Government of India in Ministry of MSME(MoMSME) has been following up the cases of the PMEGP, which is also concerned over the matter.
Union Secretary MoMSME Arun Kumar Panda has also expressed concern over the lackadaisical approach of the bankers and district level officials.
Recently, in a review meeting with the major banks, it came to light that the District Level Task Force Committee (DLTFC) Meetings are not held regularly.
The DLTFC is the organization, which scrutinizes the applications properly, so that bankers will be processing these applications for early sanction and release of funds.
As the DLTFC meetings are not held regularly at district level, in which the Collector is the Chairman, overcrowding of applications is leading to unsatisfactory scrutiny, pointed out a senior official.
Most importantly, weaker section of the society is targeted in the PMEGP and delay in clearance of applications and sanction of credit to these entrepreneurs is a major cause of concern of the Government, said he.
Under this backdrop, both bankers and district officials would have to take proactive role in this regard, said an officer.