Adityanath govt banking on MSME scheme in UP to counter unemployment

With electioneering gaining momentum and opposition sharpening attacks on the Narendra Modi government over alleged faltering socioeconomic matrices, including joblessness among youth, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh is harping on its flagship ‘One District, One Product’ (ODOP) scheme to blunt the upstaging charge.

Launched in January 2018, ODOP is aimed at revitalising the traditional industries and MSMEs associated with each of the 75 districts in UP. Under the scheme, the Yogi Adityanath government has already tied up with e-commerce major Amazon to market UP Khadi products on its platform apart from training artisans.

UP MSME and Khadi minister Satyadev Pachauri told Business Standard, that the state had already facilitated disbursal of loans worth Rs 17,500 crore to beneficiaries under the ODOP scheme so far. Pachauri has also been fielded by BJP from the prestigious Kanpur constituency in place of party veteran and sitting Member of Parliament (MP) Murli Manohar Joshi.

“We have organised ODOP summits at Lucknow, Varanasi, Meerut, Gorakhpur and Moradabad, in which about 1,84,000 entrepreneurs were given loans worth Rs 17,500 crore. Each of these enterprises create multiple job opportunities locally,” he said adding the success of the scheme would definitely be narrated during canvassing going forward.

In fact, the state government is targetting to ramp up MSME exports to the tune of Rs 5 trillion in the next few years from the current level of about Rs 1 trillion on the back of ODOP and other MSME promotional programmes, including setting up of common facility centres in all the districts.

Besides, the state government claimed nearly 3.8 million people in UP had availed of bank loans worth Rs 20,000 crore under the central MUDRA scheme during 2018-19. MUDRA scheme provides uncollateralised credit to entrepreneurs up to Rs 10 lakh. Pan India, 150 million MUDRA loans worth Rs 7 trillion had been disbursed so far to small entrepreneurs, including 40 million first-time borrowers.

Recently, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) had projected that MSME sector had added 14.9 million jobs each year during the last four years, totalling 60 million jobs under Modi.

Adityanath, who completed two years as CM on March 19, had recently claimed that 1.5 million new self-employment and private job opportunities had been created after he came to power in March 2017. He also claimed around 2,25,000 government jobs, including police had been generated over the last two years to underline his pro-development agenda in the wake of opposition cornering the BJP government over farm distress and rising joblessness.

Further, the CM had claimed under the previous Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party (SP) regimes in UP, investments of Rs 55,000 crore each were received by the state, totalling Rs 1.10 trillion during 10 years, which the BJP dispensation had surpassed in just two years by getting total investment commitments of almost Rs 5 trillion and actual investment to the tune of Rs 1.50 trillion.