KH Muniyappa, MoS, announces project 'Baadal' for MSME sector

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Here comes a good news for India's robust MSME (micro-small-medium businesses) sector. Now, small businesses can harness the cloud computing benefits. All praise goes to the Ministry of MSME.

The Minister of State with independent charge KH Muniyappa today announced the project Badal that facilitates Indian SMB industry to leverage Internet for tangible benefits.

With an aim to promote Internet-driven activities such as e-Commerce among relatively small and medium businesses in India, the MSME Ministry will rollout this project within six months. The platform would empower them with cloud-based services that include software and IT infrastructure to cut operational cost and increase efficiency.

"In order to enable SMEs to use cloud computing, we are announcing Badal program that would help them to compete in international market," said Muniyappa. He believes that this initiative would help MSME sector to expand reach of their products. Without divulging into details, the minister said that there would be minimal charges for its adoption.

MSME's additional secretary and Development Commissioner Amarendra Sinha said that 60 per cent of their schemes are online today. We are working on standardization and SLA-driven roadmap for our cloud computing initiative," he said. Sinha said that it would help bridge geographical divide.

FICCI-Nathan study, released today, also highlights that Web-enabled MSMEs get 51 per cent boost in their revenues and achieve 49 per cent increased profit when compared to offline-only counterparts. The report said that close to 95 per cent of SMBs are yet to employ Internet for operational activities.

Google India MD Rajan Anandan said that Internet could bring incredible value to the MSMEs' product portfolio. "47 million SMBs contribute 8 per cent to the GDP and that's extremely important for a country like India," Anandan said. With Google's ‘India Get Your Business Online', he said, that they are eyeing to enroll 500,000 SMBs by 2015.