Union Minister Bhagwat K Karad has asked banks and civic bodies to collaborate to achieve the goals of the PM SVANidhi scheme, which was launched to help street vendors get easy loans.
Chairing a regional-level meeting on Saturday to assess the scheme’s progress in Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal, Karad asked civic bodies to review the applications returned by banks and resubmit them after rectification.
The minister of state for finance also asked the municipal bodies to work in a ‘camp mode’ and mobilise fresh applications to achieve the targets in a time-bound manner.
Karad urged urban local bodies to intensify their efforts with innovative strategies to enhance the digital onboarding of street vendors, a statement said. He emphasised on improvement in profiling of the scheme’s beneficiaries and their families to facilitate their linkages to various central welfare schemes, it added.
The meeting was attended by representatives of the state governments, commissioners of municipal administrations and convenors of state-level bankers’ committees (SLBCs), among others.
PM Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi)
Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs launched a scheme PM Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) to empower Street Vendors by not only extending loans to them, but also for their holistic development and economic upliftment. The scheme intends to facilitate collateral free working capital loans of up to INR10,000/- of one-year tenure, to approximately 50 lakh street vendors, to help resume their businesses in the urban areas, including surrounding peri-urban/rural areas.
The PM SVANidhi scheme offers incentives in the form of:
- interest subsidy @ 7% per annum on regular repayment of loan
- cashback upto INR1200/- per annum on undertaking prescribed digital transactions
- eligibility for enhanced next tranche of loans
Close to 2 million applications have been received under this scheme, of which 752191 have been sanctioned, and 218751 loans have already been disbursed.
