Hardeep Singh Puri welcomes street vendors to be a part of SVANidhi Mahotsav

Jul 07,2022

The Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs, Shri Hardeep Singh Puri has said that Street Vendors have been an essential part of India's economic growth story with linkages with the formal economy and play a significant role in reducing cost of living, by providing goods and services at reasonable rates. He was addressing the Media Persons after launching SVANidhi Mahotsav – a cultural festival for celebrating the success of PM SVANidhi Scheme and SVANidhi Mahotsav website, here today. The Secretary, MoHUA, Shri Manoj Joshi, the Additional Secretary, MoHUA, Shri Sanjay Kumar and other dignitaries were present on the occasion.

Shri Puri said that MoHUA is organising 'SVANidhi Mahotsav' – a cultural festival for celebrating the success of PM SVANidhi Scheme and the beneficiary street vendors & their families, from 09 July to 31 July, 2022 in 75 cities across 33 States/UTs of the country. He further said that SVANidhi Mahotsav is a festival for celebrating and recognizing beneficiary street vendor's growth story and their contribution towards Indian economy. The festival aims to celebrate 75 years of India's independence with these nano-entrepreneurs, honoring their journey under PM SVANidhi scheme for demonstrating credit discipline, digital behavior and displaying their astute business acumen, he added.

Shri Puri said that the PM SVANidhi scheme was launched on June 1, 2020 to facilitate working capital loans to the street vendors to help them restart their businesses which were adversely impacted due to the lockdowns imposed during COVID-19 pandemic. He further said that this scheme is the first comprehensive effort for financial inclusion of the street vendors. Prior to this Scheme, street vendors were dependent on the informal credit channels paying high rates of interest, he added.

Saying that 53.7 lakh eligible applications have been received so far under the scheme, the Minister said that out of these, 36.6 lakh loans have been sanctioned and 33.2 lakh loans have been disbursed. The amount disbursed so far is ₹3,592 Cr and about 12 lakh street vendors have repaid their first loan.

Shri Puri said that the event will engage the street vendors & families in the esteemed presence of dignitaries and other stakeholders. He welcomed the street vendors of the nation to be a part of SVANidhi Mahotsav.

The Mahotsav will showcase a series of activities like: Cultural activities, Digital transaction training, Loan mela, Felicitation ceremony for distinguished street vendors, Experience Sharing, Nukkad nataks to propagate the features and benefits of the Scheme

Features and Measures taken for the Success of the Scheme:

The scheme facilitates collateral free working capital loan upto ₹10,000, of 1 year tenure, with enhanced loan of ₹20,000 and ₹50,000 in the second and third term respectively, on repayment of earlier loans, to enable business expansion.

The Scheme incentivizes adoption of digital transactions by way of cashback of upto ₹ 100 per month which in turn would build their credit profile facilitating future loans from the Lending Institutions

The Scheme incentivises the repayment by way of 7% interest subsidy.

The structuring of the product was done in such a way that if a Street Vendors repays the loan EMIs promptly and conducts the required number of digital transactions, the interest subsidy and the cashback availed would make the loan interest free.

The Novel concept of 'Letter of Recommendation' (LoR) was introduced to recognise new street vendors by encouraging demand based registration.

The importance of LoR can be gauged from the fact that more than 30 lakh new vendors have been recognised through this instrument, thereby doubling the number of recognised street vendors to around 60 lakhs.

Due to the constant persuasion of this Ministry, 25 States have either exempted the stamp duty on PM SVANidhi loans or charging a nominal amount of up to ₹ 100.

An end-to-end IT solution has been developed for implementation of the Scheme including Svanidhi Se Samridhi, integrating the data-base of Aadhar, Udyamimitra, SIDBI, NPCI, PAiSA portal etc. thus promoting the Digital India initiative for the most vulnerable sections of the economy.

All the above measures taken by the Ministry have made PM SVANidhi the fastest growing micro credit scheme since independence.

Digital on-boarding of beneficiaries is an integral part of PM SVANidhi Scheme, which helps build credit profile of the street vendors. Such vendors are acting as Digital Messengers in more than 4,500 urban locations.

To further give an impetus to the Digital onboarding and training, Main Bhi Digital (MBD) campaign was launched in January – February 2021. MBD 2.0 was again implemented from July 1- August 15, 2021. MDB 3.0 was implemented in coordination with MeiTY and 3rd Party private digital payment aggregators (PayTM, Phone Pe, Bharat Pe, MSwipe and Aceware participated) select 223 cities from September 9 – November 30, 2021.

Till date, 12.8 lakh are digitally active and have recorded 19 crore digital transactions. These beneficiaries have claimed ₹12 crore as cashback.

Through SVANidhi Se Samriddhi scheme, we encourage them to adopt and to build a safety net for the vendors' families for their holistic development.

Through SVANidhi Se Samriddhi, PM SVANidhi beneficiaries & their family members are provided single window access to 8 Central Government welfare schemes. Till date more than 25 lakh sanctions have been made under these schemes facilitating socio-economic upliftment of more than 11 Lakh beneficiaries and family members.

Till date more than 25 lakh sanctions have been made under these schemes facilitating socio-economic upliftment of more than 11 Lakh beneficiaries and family members.