The Centre has introduced regulatory relaxations and enhanced credit access to support MSME growth. Measures include BIS exemptions under quality norms, RBI mandated loan benchmarking, credit guarantees and collateral free lending to ease compliance and boost expansion.
The Centre is taking special steps to boost the growth of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises by easing rules to facilitate the ease of doing business and providing them better access to credit for expanding their business operations, according to an official statement issued on Sunday. The Centre's Bureau of Indian Standards, which implements Quality Control Orders (QCOs) issued by various Ministries, gives special exemptions and relaxations for MSMEs, to ensure that the QCOs do not disrupt domestic production, the statement said.
Some of the key relaxations and exemptions include an additional 3 to 6 months extension in time for Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) and an exemption for imports by domestic manufacturers for producing export-oriented products.
Exemption for import of up to 200 units for research & development purposes and provision for clearance of legacy stock (manufactured or imported before implementation) within six months from the effective date are other relaxations that have been provided for MSMEs.
The BIS has also implemented financial and technical relaxations to the MSME sector, which include concessions ranging from 10 to 80 per cent in the annual minimum marking fee with concession. An additional concession of 10 per cent is also provided to enterprises that are either located in the northeast region or women entrepreneur MSME units.
Besides, the requirement of maintaining an in-house laboratory has been made optional for MSME units. MSME units are allowed to utilize the services of outside BIS-recognized laboratories, NABL-accredited labs, or even share resources like cluster-based labs or laboratories of other manufacturing units.
The 'Levels of Control' in the Scheme of Inspection and Testing (SIT) are made recommendatory in nature. The manufacturer has the choice to define their own control unit/batch/lot and their own Levels of Control and inform the BIS.
The BIS has also made the product certification process guidelines publicly available on the BIS website and is issuing product-wise manuals as guidance documents for conformity assessment as per various Indian Standards.