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Vedanta launches 'Saathi' programme offering range of services for MSMEs

Mining firm Vedanta Limited, on Tuesday, launched the Vedanta Saathi programme for the MSME sector. The programme comes with a variety of offerings for the MSMEs such as an e-commerce portal, channel financing through banks, NBFCs and fintech firms at attractive rates, and a dedicated MSME website.

Speaking at the virtual launch event, Nitin Gadkari, Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), said, “Today, we need capital investment, we need entrepreneurship and technical innovation to make Indian economy globally strong.

As MSME minister, I am happy to see that this initiative comes in line with Aatmanirbhar Bharat and your vendors are going to create more employment opportunities. At the same time the initiative will support the innovators who are starting new projects.”

Vedanta’s e-commerce portal will provide advantages including transparent pricing, easy access to products, small lot buying, channel financing and micro-logistics support. Other advantages include live pricing options, direct buy access to a diverse product portfolio with no bar on quantity, as well as easy delivery tracking and micro-logistics.

The programme will also provide a dedicated MSME website with one stop shop highlighting all offerings for MSMEs and a platform to connect.

“MSME plays a very, very important part in our economy and 1/3 of India's manufacturing output is done by MSMEs. They employ around 120 million people. They are the employment generator engine of the country. We have decided to partner with MSME industries. We have seen what are the requirements of the MSME industries and what is that we need to do to make them establish around our complexes,” Anil Agarwal, Executive Chairman – Vedanta Resources Ltd, said.

Other offerings of the programme includes skill development with the help of webinars, knowledge sharing and assistance to MSMEs. Vedanta is keen to offer its community of industry associations, technical experts and research institutes for collaboration with MSMEs to engineer development of new products, product applications and new markets for those applications, helping upskill MSMEs to match global standards and eventually substitution of imports.

Contributing towards the vision of making India a global manufacturing hub, Vedanta is looking to enable MSMEs to set up their ancillaries and downstream manufacturing facilities near its plants.

“We are offering MSMEs the complexes around our locations where we can partner with them to produce and work at the downstream industries of our products. They can also work as our ancillary industries. They also have the opportunity to work as a job, work on a contract facility,” Agarwal said.

In the meantime, Gadkari mentioned that the ministry will provide all kinds of support to the Vedanta Saathi programme and urged them to create a similar initiative for national highways.

“I am making 22 green expressways. You will go from Delhi to Dehradun in two hours and Delhi to Mumbai in 12 hours. We will get the roads of international standard within three years. Our road infrastructure will be equal to European standards and American standards,” he said.

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