“The pandemic has triggered a significant restructuring in the global supply chain, with countries and industries looking to diversify their sources of supply and services. This offers our MSMEs a huge opportunity to tap into the new markets that are opening up,” said Nitin Gadkari, Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, and Minister for Road Transport & Highways, while inaugurating the event.
Vedanta’s offerings for MSMEs under the Saathi programme include channel financing in partnership with leading banks, NBFCs and FinTech firms, and avenues for technical upskilling.
“Through this programme, MSMEs can set up downstream/ancillary manufacturing units near Vedanta’s plants, with benefits like just-in-time delivery of raw material (hot metal supplies), low working capital and CAPEX involvement,” the company said in a statement.
The company will also be launching an e-commerce platform for the MSMEs to check the prices of materials in an easy and transparent way of buying from Vedanta’s value-added products, with doorstep delivery through micro-logistics partners.
“Currently, more than 150 of the company’s MSME customers have availed channel financing to access a credit limit of Rs 1000 crore Vedanta is committed to growing this limit by 5 times for MSME customers, adding more banks and NBFCs to its fold,” said the group’s chairman, Anil Agarwal during the event.
Union Minister Gadkari urged the chairman to also focus on creating industrial parks and clusters in agricultural areas.
“Your vendors are going to create more employment which is going to help India eradicating poverty. We will fully support you. Try to make the clusters near the highway, green express highway, and near agricultural areas,” he said.
Several steel companies have launched initiatives to help MSMEs in sourcing their raw material. JSW Steel, Tata Steel and Jindal Steel and Power Ltd have introduced exclusive pricing schemes for MSMEs, while ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel (AMNS) said that they always supply steel at export-parity prices for MSMEs.
This comes at a time when the viral pandemic has led a lot of MSMEs to shut shop even as the price of the commodity steel has gone up significantly in the past year. Steelmakers have taken atleast 10-13 hikes in the past year and the price of the commodity has touched record high levels of Rs 56,000 per tonne.
In connection to that, minister Gadkari said that he is actively looking for an alternative for steel and cement.
“So now I’m searching for an alternative for steel and cement. We working very hard on it. We are accepting an international technology by which we can reduce the demand for steel and cement. Now we are taking a lot of initiatives for that,” he said.
“When I’m creating demand for steel and cement, the industry is creating a cartel and exploiting the people which is very painful for me,” Gadkari said.
Source : Economic Times
