According to the NSSO survey of 2013, there are 5.77 crore small business units, mostly individual proprietorships, which run small manufacturing, trading or services activities. Most of these ‘own account enterprises’ are owned by people belonging to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Classes. Only 4% of such units get institutional finance. Providing access to institutional finance to such micro/small business units would turn them into strong instrument of GDP growth and also employment.

Micro Finance is an economic development tool whose objective is to assist the poor to work their way out of poverty. It covers a range of services which include, in addition to the provision of credit, many other services such as savings, insurance, money transfers, counseling etc. The players in the Micro Finance sector can be qualified as falling into 3 main groups:- the SHG-Bank linkage model started by NABARD, the Non Banking Finance companies and the others including Trusts, Societies etc.

The government proposes to set up a Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency (MUDRA) Bank through a statutory enactment. This Bank would be responsible for regulating and refinancing all Micro-finance Institutions (MFI) which are in the business of lending to micro/small business entities engaged in manufacturing, trading and services activities. The Bank would partner with state level/regional level co-ordinators to provide finance to Last Mile Financer of small/micro business enterprises.

The MUDRA Bank would primarily be responsible for –

1)    Laying down policy guidelines for micro/small enterprise financing business

2)    Registration of MFI entities

3)    Regulation of MFI entities

4)    Accreditation /rating of MFI entities

5)    Laying down responsible financing practices to ward off indebtedness and ensure proper client protection principles and methods of recovery

6)    Development of standardised set of covenants governing last mile lending to micro/small enterprises

7)    Promoting right technology solutions for the last mile

8)    Formulating and running  a Credit Guarantee scheme for providing guarantees to the loans which are being extended to micro enterprises

9)    Creating  a good architecture of Last Mile Credit Delivery to micro businesses under the scheme of Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana

A sum of Rs 20,000 crores would be allocated to the  MUDRA Bank from the money available from shortfalls of Priority Sector Lending for creating a Refinance Fund to provide refinance to the Last Mile Financers. Another Rs 3,000 crore would be provided to the MUDRA Bank from the budget to create a Credit Guarantee corpus for guaranteeing loans being provided to the micro enterprises.

The above measures would not only help in increasing access of finance to the unbanked but also bring down the cost of finance from the last Mile Financers to the micro/small enterprises, most of which are in the informal sector.