Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Traders’ body Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) on Sunday said it will make attempts to get 75 lakh traders on the Udyam Registration portal and bring them into the MSME fold. CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal in a statement said the confederation will campaign from April 10 to reach out to the traders in 75 prominent cities in association with local trade bodies to apprise them about the benefits of registering on the Udyam portal including priority sector lending.

CAIT said in a recent meeting with Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, the latter had urged trade leaders to motivate more and more traders across the country to onboard the Udyam portal. The registered traders “will be competent to obtain financial loans from banks under priority sector lending at lower interest rates. It is certainly a big relief for the fund-starved business community that has gone through a very tough time in the past two years due to Covid,” Khandelwal and CAIT President BC Bhartia said in a joint statement. 

Importantly, businesses engaged in wholesale and retail trading were ousted from the MSME definition back in June 2017 since they didn’t cater to manufacturing or service activities. However, in July last year, the government had announced reinstating them under the new MSME definition. According to the official notification, enterprises operating in wholesale and retail trade and repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles, wholesale trade except of motor vehicles and motorcycles, and retail trade except of motor vehicles and motorcycles were allowed to register on the Udyam portal. 

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CAIT said it has tied up with various agencies to handhold traders for easy registration in exchange for a nominal fee. Currently, over 80 lakh businesses have registered on the Udyam portal since its launch on July 1, 2020. Udyam portal is a successor to the Udyam Aadhaar Memorandum (UAM) for MSME registration. UAM was valid till March 31, 2022, for businesses to benefit from various MSME-related schemes of the government. Since 2020, enterprises have been encouraged by the MSME Ministry to switch to the new Udyam portal in order to remain under the MSME category.