Indian Industries Association (IIA), an apex body of MSME in India which was focussing predominantly on the Uttar Pradesh is planning to focus on the increasing membership for a better representation.

The association had recently elected Pankaj Kumar as its National President for the year 2020-21 for consecutively second year in the online meeting held recently. Speaking to CMR, Pankaj Kumar highlighted his priorities for the year 2020-21 and stated that he would work for the development of MSMEs. Among his priorities, Mr. Kumar has decided to increase the membership of IIA, export promotion, industries establishment in UP Defense Corridor, MSME Survey and Research and expansion of IIA chapters in other states.

Pankaj Kumar further said that not only do we have to fight the situation arising out of the COVID-19 epidemic but we should also take advantage of the new business opportunities generated by it. Calling self-reliant India by the Prime Minister should be taken as an opportunity by the MSMEs and country seriously he also expressed concerns that some businesses have come under difficulty due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Micro and Small industries are in biggest cash crunch. “The money is not getting liquidated with the enterpeeneurs. To my knowledge more than 33% of the SMEs are sufeering from payment from the Government departments and even big corporates are delaying the payments.” , he said. He also added that the government departments should release the money to liquidate among the market and banks should come forward to fund the SMEs in terms of loans.

Pankaj also expressed that the ECLG alone is not sufficient for the industries to run. He also said that the government procurement percentage should also increase from the MSME companies in addition to the existing percentage. He said his team will ensure prompt representaion of the concerns of the companies through various means.

Expansion in other regions:

The association which was predominantly active only in Uttar Pradesh region had decided to move further in other regions too. “We would like to have representative offices in other Northern states and we already have in Uttarkhand and Delhi. We now aim to have our represenation offices in Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab.”, says Pankaj who also added the key merits of such expansion is to integrate and collaborate with other states for knowledge transfer and exchange. “We analyse what are the best MSME policies in states like Delhi or Rajasthan and if we find it better, we insist the UP government implement the same and vice-verca. This we had found working extremely well after we read the policy book of Madhya Pradesh which demands seven facilitation centers for the entire state while despite being a bigger state, UP had one facilitation center.”, says Pankaj who said after the association represented that with the state government for having more centers.