Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday announced the doubling of the upper limit of Mudra loans to Rs 20 lakh to promote entrepreneurship in the country.
"The limit of Mudra loans will be enhanced to Rs 20 lakh from the current Rs 10 lakh for those entrepreneurs who have availed and successfully repaid previous loans under the 'Tarun category', she said while presenting the Budget in the Lok Sabha.
Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) was launched on April 8, 2015, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to facilitate easy collateral-free micro-credit of up to Rs 10 lakh to non-corporate, non-farm small and micro-entrepreneurs for income-generating activities.
Loans under PMMY are provided by Member Lending Institutions (MLIs) — banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), microfinance institutions (MFIs) and other financial intermediaries.
As per the existing scheme, banks provide collateral-free loans up to Rs 10 lakh under three categories -- Shishu (up to Rs 50,000), Kishore (between Rs 50,000 and Rs 5 lakh) and Tarun (Rs 10 lakh).
"Our government is committed to all-round, all-pervasive and all inclusive development of people, particularly, farmers, youth, women and poor," she said.
For achieving social justice comprehensively, the saturation approach of covering all eligible people through various programmes including those for education and health will be adopted to empower them by improving their capabilities, she said.
Implementation of schemes meant for supporting economic activities by craftsmen, artisans, self-help groups, scheduled caste, scheduled tribe and women entrepreneurs, and street vendors, such as PM Vishwakarma, PM SVANidhi, National Livelihood Missions, and Stand-Up India will be stepped up, she said.
To improve the socio-economic condition of tribal communities, she said, "We will launch the Pradhan Mantri Janjatiya Unnat Gram Abhiyan by adopting saturation coverage for tribal families in tribal-majority villages and aspirational districts. This will cover 63,000 villages benefitting 5 crore tribal people."
She also said SIDBI will open new branches to expand its reach to serve all major MSME clusters within three years and provide direct credit to them.
With the opening of 24 such branches this year, the service coverage will expand to 168 out of 242 major clusters, she said.
