Govt forms five task forces to make Indian MSMEs future-ready: Secy

The government has constituted five task forces to make India's micro, small and medium enterprises future-ready and formulate a concrete strategy towards making the country a leading exporter, a top government official said on Thursday. MSME Secretary AK Sharma expressed confidence that it would be on the path of implementing the futuristic initiatives by the start of next year.

"We have formed five ministerial task forces which will be headed by our key officers. These five task forces would work for a month in five key areas where we feel that the industry of the country and particularly the MSME sector should head towards," Sharma said at a virtual session organised by FICCI.

He added that one of the five areas identified is Industry 4.0, including elements like artificial intelligence, 3D and virtual reality, and this task force has been formed with the objective of making India a global leader in Industry 4.0.

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"With this mission and objective, the task force would work for a month, get the best practices of the world, get the inputs of experts and come back to the ministry with concrete strategy and action points within a month," the secretary said.

Sharing details on the other task forces, he said the second area is export promotion and import reduction, including how to focus in the key manufacturing areas, how to improve our quality standards, designs and technology, packaging.

The final objective is to see that India becomes a global manufacturing hub and a leading exporter in the world.

The third is how to re-engineer vertically and horizontally our existing cluster schemes so that they are able to assist the grass-root and the micro-level enterprises as well as the high-end enterprises, Sharma said.

The Secretary said the fourth task force will focus on how to integrate our technology centres.

The fifth task force will explore interventions to align various modernisation schemes like ZED (zero defect and zero effect) and LEAN (for manufacturing competitiveness), as well as other schemes related to design, intellectual property rights and marketing scheme.

By the beginning of next year, we would be on the path of implementing these futuristic initiatives, the secretary said.