The Minister of State for Finance Shiv Pratap Shukla informed the Lok Sabha that Government and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have taken several steps to ensure access of credit to MSMEs. These inter-alia, include, advice to all Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) to achieve a 20% year-on-year growth in credit to Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs), allocation of 60% of the MSEs advances to the micro enterprise accounts, a 10% annual growth in number of micro enterprise accounts, additional working capital limit to meet the requirements arising due to unforeseen/seasonal increase in demand, adoption of one cluster, operationalising at least one specialised MSME Branch in every district, simplified computation of working capital of MSE units to make it minimum 20% of the projected annual turnover of the unit for borrowal limits upto Rs 5 crore, setting up of Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) to solve the problem of delayed payment of MSMEs, etc.

The disbursement of loans to MSME increased 14.8% to Rs 906288 crore in 2017-18 from Rs 789227 crore in 2016-17.

An online lending portal www.psbloansin59minutes.com with majority ownership of 6 Public Sector Banks (PSBs)/ Financial Institutions (FIs) along with their associated companies, has been launched which facilitates in principle approval for loans to Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) upto Rs 1 crore within 59 minutes from PSBs. Key features of the portal, inter-alia include enabling borrowers to connect with multiple banks without visiting the branch, financial technology (FinTech) based architecture with high level of information security, analysis of data from various data points, loan products in line with scoring models and assessment methods within approved credit policies, prima facie eligibility check for credit guarantee from CGTMSE (Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises), etc.