Flagship job scheme draws poor response

Ambika Sharma

Tribune News Service

Solan, December 10

The reluctance of banks to fund the state government’s flagship self-employment scheme, Mukhya Mantri Swavlamban Yojna, has stunted its growth with barely 1,597 persons getting employed in 428 small ventures set up across the state ever since it was launched in August 2018.

Loans worth Rs 7.91 crore have been extended under this scheme till now for 428 ventures. Though it was supposed to encourage local entrepreneurship, their proposals have failed to find acceptance of the banks. As many as 27 public sector banks, all regional rural banks, cooperative banks and Small Industries Development Bank of India and all private sector scheduled commercial banks have been authorized to fund this scheme.

The Industries Department invites applications from those aspiring to set up their own ventures and after scrutinizing them the cases are forwarded to the banks for loans.

“As many as 288 cases were sanctioned by the Industries Department in Sirmaur and barely 58 were extended loans while 64 were out rightly rejected by the various banks as they were not found viable” informed Member Secretary, Industries Department, Sirmaur.

He said the banks were not keen to fund this scheme and even their procedure was lengthy even if an applicant wanted to avail a small loan of Rs 5 lakh. He added that banks weighted various factors like viability of the projects, personal competence of a candidate, his credit score and factors like a bad loan in the past. Rural youth, who wanted to start their own enterprises, had to avail a GST number, PAN card and even get a project report. These formalities were quite exhaustive.

He said that a state cooperative bank should be made the nodal agency as the state government should set aside a corpus to fund this scheme as nationalized banks followed a rigorous procedure which failed to be fulfilled.

The situation was no better in Solan where as against 356 cases sanctioned by the Industries Department barely 32 cases were approved for loans by the banks since August 2018.

Additional District Magistrate, Vivek Chandel, said the issue of banks sanctioning few cases was being regularly taken up with the banks in the district level bankers committee as well as with the manager of lead bank so that more loans can be extended to the aspiring youth. He said they were also undertaking case to case review with the banks so that the hurdles could be removed.