Growth plan: Bengal initiates GIS survey of 570 MSME clusters
Kolkata: Considering MSME (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises) as a key sector of Bengal's economy, the Mamata Banerjee government has initiated a GIS survey of the existing 570 MSME clusters.
The outcome of the survey will benefit the sector in different ways. First of all the state government will develop more technologically advanced infrastructure as the survey will provide detailed data on the kind of technology that is in use at present in each of the clusters.
Secondly, the survey will provide the exact location (including latitude and longitude) of every cluster.
The location details will be made available in a portal, which will act as an interface between investors from any part of the world and clusters' entrepreneurs or artisans.
The MSME sector has witnessed a massive development and came up as a crucial factor in the state's economy in the past 10 years with a series of steps taken by the Mamata Banerjee government.
There were only 30 MSME clusters ten years ago. Now it has gone up to 570 involving around 5 lakh people.
The support of the state government by setting up common facility centres, creating storage facilities and providing necessary machinery had helped in setting up of a large number of MSME clusters in the past 10 years.
"Now the initiative of carrying out a GIS survey has been taken up to provide further advanced machinery to artisans and create necessary further improved infrastructure as and where required for the clusters.
At the same time a database containing their exact locations will be made available in a portal that will be exclusively launched for the MSME clusters," said a senior state government officer.
The work of the GIS survey started at the end of June and would be completed in the next 15 to 20 days.
Citing an example of wooden furniture cluster at Siliguri, incense stick cluster at Baruipur in South 24-Parganas and "jari" cluster in Howrah, the officer said that the state government had earlier set up a common facility centre for each of these clusters in a locally available facility. For example, the common facility centre for "jari" clusters was set up at Jari Hub at Andul in Howrah. Artisans visit the centre to use different machineries that the state government had installed a few years ago.
"Technologically updated machineries will be installed at the centre as per the findings of the survey," the officer said.
It needs mention that the annual report 2020-21 of the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises had revealed that Bengal was in second position with 88.67 lakh MSME units leaving behind states including Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.
