Why in News?

• The Union Ministry for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) has launched a project named ‘Tech Saksham’ to accelerate MSME growth through technology enablement.

Highlights:

• It is a Ministry of MSME and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) partnered project which brings together technology majors Dell Technologies India, HP India, etc to address technological gaps faced by MSMEs in their growth.
• The Vision is to bridge the gap in technology adoption for MSMEs so as to provide an impetus for them to be competitive on a global scale, increase their contribution to country exports and leverage cost efficiencies.
• It is a three-year-long comprehensive project which, in its first phase, will focus on sectors that are labour-intensive and have the propensity to respond positively to tech-adoption, and will spark a larger discussion in other MSME clusters.
• Through various policy recommendations, knowledge sessions, mentoring initiatives, and useful resource banks for MSMEs, the project will help in addressing critical barriers in the MSME ecosystem such as awareness and cost of technology purchase/maintenance, resources and manpower required to run the technologies, return on investments, etc.