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| Loans to be given to women entrepreneurs | | | Early Times Report
Jammu, Feb 5
To provide women of the state an opportunity to set up their own business units, the government had introduced a scheme under which loans upto Rs 3 lakh at a very low rate of interest were to be provided.
But even after the announcement made about nine months back, it has failed to evoke any interest among the women entrepreneurs.
Confirming the poor response, official sources said that under the scheme 100 women entrepreneurs had to be selected from each district of the state.
In first phase, 2200 women were to be granted loans upto Rs 3 lakh through the State Women Development Corporation (SWDC).
Sources said that women, however, were not sure whether they would be able to run the units for which they would be given small loans.
According to sources efforts were afoot to encourage women to accept this scheme and in this direction government has decided to extend this scheme to the tehsil level once it bore some fruit at the district level.
Initially, government shall provide a revolving fund of Rs 10 crores to SWDC in installments depending on the progress of the scheme.
The Corporation has been asked to ensure techno economic viability and profitability of the enterprises and develop a scientific monitoring mechanism for timely interventions to ensure success of the assisted units.
The Government has identified fields for this purpose which include health care and pharmaceuticals, restaurants, computers, information technology, agro based industries, floriculture, cosmetics, perfumery, parlours hosiery, ceramics, tailoring, leather and food products. Some of the entrepreneurs have informed the government that the sum of Rs 3 lakhs was too meager an amount to help them set up even health care units and pharmaceuticals.
A senior officer in the Industries Department said that the culture for setting up units under various self-employment schemes in the states was very poor.
He said the government had introduced a number of self-employment schemes but there was no major response and invariably people simply grabbed the incentives and never bothered to start production.
He further said this has been one of the reasons for high rate of industrial sickness in the state.
Even the Minister for Agriculture, Ghulam Hassan Mir saw no prospects in encouraging unemployed agricultural graduates for setting up feed production units under self-employment scheme.
Mir said that there was great potential for setting up feed production units under self-employment schemes because the state import poultry and livestock feed worth several hundred crores of rupees annually.
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