The Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the promised Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency Ltd (MUDRA) Bank on 8 April, 2015 with a corpus of Rs 20,000 crore and a credit guarantee corpus of Rs 3,000 crore. The launch was the fulfillment of an announcement made earlier by the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his FY 15-16 Budget.
Most individuals, especially those living in rural and interior parts of India, have been excluded from the benefits of formal banking system. Therefore, they never had access to insurance, credit, loans and other financial instruments to help them establish and grow their micro businesses. So, most individuals depend on local money lenders for credit. The loan comes at high interest and often with unbearable conditions, which make these poor unsuspecting people fall in a debt-trap for generations. When businesses fail, the borrowers become vulnerable to the lender’s strong-arm tactics and other forms of humiliation.
As per NSSO Survey of 2013, there are close to 5.77 crore small-scale business units, mostly sole proprietorships, which undertake trading, manufacturing, retail and other small-scale activities. Compare this with the organised sector and larger companies that employ 1.25 crore individuals. Clearly, the potential to harness and nurture these micro businesses is vast and the government recognises this. Today, this segment is unregulated and without financial support or cover from the organised financial banking system.
Main factors of this Scheme :-
- Regulate the lender and the borrower of microfinance and bring stability to the microfinance system through regulation and inclusive participation.
- Extend finance and credit support to Microfinance Institutions (MFI) and agencies that lend money to small businesses, retailers, self-help groups and individuals.
- Register all MFIs and introduce a system of performance rating and accreditation for the first time. This will help last-mile borrowers of finance to evaluate and approach the MFI that meets their requirement best and whose past record is most satisfactory. This will also introduce an element of competitiveness among the MFIs. The ultimate beneficiary will be the borrower.
- Provide structured guidelines for the borrowers to follow to avoid failure of business or take corrective steps in time. MUDRA will help in laying down guidelines or acceptable procedures to be followed by the lenders to recover money in cases of default.
- Develop the standardised covenants that will form the backbone of the last-mile business in future.
- Offer a Credit Guarantee scheme for providing guarantees to loans being offered to micro businesses.
- Introduce appropriate technologies to assist in the process of efficient lending, borrowing and monitoring of distributed capital.
- Build a suitable framework under the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana for developing an efficient last-mile credit delivery system to small and micro businesses.
