New Delhi, Sep 27 (KNN) India's hope of becoming 5 trillion dollar economy won't be possible until and unless Micro Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) start playing more vital, crucial, critical and important role in the entire economy, said MSME Secretary Dr Arun Kumar Panda here on Thursday.

While addressing the gatherings at an event on 'Outreach of Emerging Technologies to MSME', Panda said, ''As India hopes to become 5 trillion economy but it won't be possible till MSMEs play an important, vital, crucial role and contribute in the same manner to country's economy.''

''Our MSME Minister keeps stressing that MSME contribution needs to go from current 29 per cent to 50 per cent, but how does it happen? Many things are required for these things to happen. One of the most important thing is that they should be able to adopt, adapt, except and to improvise upon the appropriate technologies, the latest technology,'' he suggested.

''There are many technologies across the world, but if they can't afford those technologies, it’s of no use to them,'' he said.

In his 15 minutes long speech, Panda also stressed on lack of access to information and termed it one of the biggest challenges which MSMEs face. He also said that only giving handholding support won't make much changes.

''Large industries, corporates have number of consultant, domestic and international, who actually tells them what is best on the table and where is it, how can we source that technology. But in case of MSMEs, they even don't know and even aren't aware about the minutest technology which is there.

And as you know the lack of access to information is one of the biggest challenges that MSMEs face. Not only we need to make available of technologies or mentoring them or giving handholding support and the credit support. We need to make them viable, we need make their manufacturing more competitive, we need to do a lot of things and one of the most important thing is the upgradation of technologies,'' Panda said.

Panda further said that government has constituted Technology Cluster Manager (TCM) which has around 23 experts of which 3 to 4 are international experts. They are working and are in talks with the industries associations to all stake holders and they come up with their suggestions from the improvement of technologies.

''These experts are informing us that when we set up this 15 ongoing technologies centre what are the kind of machines, equipment that we must set up and what are the specifications that we must look into that one machine should have in it so MSMEs can actually take benefit from them,'' Panda added.

While commenting on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Secretary said,'' With the help of this technology companies in world are already flourishing and we too have decided to work on it. Our technologies centre should address these needs of MSME in different places across of the country. We are also in the process of setting up known as Enterprise Development Centre (EDC) where the entrepreneur who are going to handle these development centre so i urge MSME to visit them if they are looking something in Artificial Intelligence.''

''We are also coming up with the portal where these things would be made available in 22 languages because many of the MSMEs neither understand Hindi nor English following which we have decide to put up these information on portal in these languages some that people can find out where these particular resource is there,'' he said.

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