Large Firms Must Take Responsibility To Handhold MSMEs: Piyush Goyal

Large companies must take responsibility to handhold micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), help them adapt best practices and integrate them into the supply chain ecosystem, said Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Monday.

While speaking at the fourth plenary session of the B20 India inception meeting, he noted that MSMEs flourish around a larger unit or anchor. 

Citing an example, he said, as Apple's manufacturing plant comes up, thousands of MSME units flourish in the ecosystem as mini value chain suppliers to Apple. 

The minister also said, "MSMEs have more practical solutions, day-to-day experiences, and having learnt the hard way, are able to adapt to circumstances better than large companies."

He said large companies must be sensitised to handhold MSMEs associated with them. 

"We must also try to make it easier to operate for small companies, eliminate unnecessary paperwork, make custom processes simpler, and use technology to ease and simplify processes," Goyal stated. 

Goyal urged the industry to recognise global efforts to tackle climate change and take up the responsibility of becoming conscious and sustainable in their business practices.

He pointed out that Singapore has been playing an important role as a trading hub and suggested that a study can be done to figure out what Singapore has been doing right and based on this a basic framework can be created for supporting MSMEs. 

It may involve Infrastructure development, addressing challenges of logistics, he added. He also said MSMEs bring trust to the table, which is the most important element of any value chain be it domestic or international.