Our country loves big entrepreneurs like Adani and Ambani and Tatas, but they don’t create many jobs

Our country loves big entrepreneurs like Adani and Ambani and Tatas, but they don’t create many jobs. Reliance group has around 3.5 lakh employees. Adani has 0.5 lakh employees, Tata group has 7 lakh employees. For a single group, these numbers are large and significant. And for Indian the economy which needs 12 to 18 million new jobs every year, it is not.

Kerala MSME story

Last month I went to KMT shopping mall in Kottakkal, a small town in Kerala run by a small employer who employed 270 young employees. Now imagine what would happen if it shuts down? Where would these 270 youth go?

The second story is about Kottakkal Ayurveda Sala, a 120 year old institution which employs over 5000 employees across their multiple hospitals and dispensaries. This is a classic service industry enterprise with many employees doing frontline roles with entry level salaries. Most employees join as apprentices for one year and join full time for rest of their life. The point is if we see MSMEs from the stand point of turnover or economic value addition, they are small compared to big manufacturing companies. But when you see from the stand point of employment then they are the giants who hold the society and youth MSMEs group are as big or even bigger than the farming group. Very few people know this.

MSMEs vs. The Farm Sector

According to my study there are 100 to 145 million farmers in India. Against this, the number of self-employed MSME enterprises are estimated at 57 million and another 73 million entrepreneurs employ 111 million people. If you add the entrepreneurs and their employees, over 168 million families are dependant on MSMEs, much more than farmers.

But MSME sector get one sixth of what farm lobby gets Agri sector and farmers get nine subsidies including – Fertilizer, Power, Agricultural Equipment, Irrigation, Seed subsidy, Export subsidy, Credit subsidy, Agricultural infrastructure subsidy. estimates, in 2016-17 Annual central government subsidies to farmers would be of the order of 120,500 crore. This excludes State government subsidies. Against this the MSME Ministry got allocation of about 22,000 crores in the 23-24 central budget.

What can we do for the MSME entrepreneur

It is time we treat the MSME entrepreneur as a hero and focus on improving the ease of doing business for the MSME entrepreneur.