With the advent of ‘Make in India’ and enhanced focus on locally manufactured products along with the Government’s thrust on doubling engineering goods exports in the next five years and to reach $200 billion by 2030, there is a huge opportunity for the MSME sector. A favourable Government Procurement Policy along with a huge industrial base in the State should also encourage MSMEs to grow their businesses. Experts as well as entrepreneurs from the sector guided the participants on the vast opportunities this sector has to offer.

 

Experts sharing their views at the conference. 

 

Rajeev Aggarwal, VED Executive Committee Member, was the expert moderator for the panel discussion on engineering products. Sivamanthan from NMRCL as panelist gave updates on the MAHAMETRO scenario which is targeted for completion by 2020 and would offer huge opportunities. There would be a lot of research put in by them to know about what would be needed and could be indigenised. They are employing local vendors and sub-contractors.

There would be new residential and shopping areas, buildings at Zero Mile, therefore a lot cement, steel would be required - all localized. It is a very transparent system. There would be four-fold growth in the economy along the line of the metro. MAHAMETRO, therefore, has large opportunities, and so far 78 vendors have registered of which 28 are local.

 

Dr Amit Bansiwal, Principal Scientist of NEERI spoke of eco-friendly solutions to problems. He said, “One has to achieve eco-friendly, sustainable economic grown of industry and there must be updating in cleaner technology.”

Established in 1986, NEERI initially worked in water and now every area is covered under their activities including air and water pollution, effluent treatment plants, sewage treatment etc. They work very closely with people and their philosophy is that development and sustainability go together. They provide technologies and this needs to be propagated. They have many protective products too. They have even come up with green crackers. NEERI can hand-hold with SMEs. Prashant Garg of Diffusion Engineers informed that their company takes care of a wear and tear and corrosion wherever needed. They basically increase the life of the equipment, say, from 6 months to 9 months.

“People are now looking at entire services and not just products, a complete solution for increasing the life of a product,” he said. He said, the company keeps interacting with their clients and has constant dialogue with them. They prefer to do more for them than diversify.

 

Askho Mrig, Director, Excel Controlinkage Pvt. Ltd., said, “EV technology is now coming in with new technological products.” They are looking to partner with local people and invite them to see how they work and let them use their premises and use their facilities to develop.

 

Hakimuddin Ali stated that there was a huge disconnect today between Nagpur’s USP - the Orange – and no common synergy. He said, “We have to bring people doing the same thing together, a system by which everybody collaborates and there’s no competition i.e. go for clusters with common facilities and synergies, trust and faith which speaks a common language. Individual flagship companies can’t rise, so it is better to create a core competence and clusters. Oneneeds to trigger the right thing and then all the back-end support comes up.”

 

The programme ended with a talk by Dr Ushoshri Guha and Dr Borkar on patents which is only for inventions and technologies, not for discoveries.

 

Rina Sinha, VED Executive Committee Member, as the MoC ably handled both days with effortless ease.