LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath disbursed loans worth Rs 2,505 crore to 31,542 MSME units on Wednesday, as part of the ‘Online Swarozgar Sangam’.
The online loan mela was the first to be organised this year and the CM has directed officials to hold one such mela in each district within the next one month.
In an interaction with beneficiaries of the scheme, the CM asked them about their projects for which loans had been taken.
He then gave tool kits to five beneficiaries under the Vishwakarma Shram Samman Scheme and virtually launched common facility centres under the one district-one product scheme in nine districts including Bhadohi, Moradabad, Ghaziabad, Mirzapur, Mainpuri, Mau, Agra, Bijnor and Muzaffarnagar.
The cost of these CFCs is Rs 73.54 crore.
Additional Chief Secretary (MSME) Navneet Sehgal said that this was the first such online loan fair organised this year and in 2020, the government had helped more than 34,000 MSME units get loans of Rs 73,000 crore.
Declaring that the government was on the verge of giving freedom to people from the second wave, the CM said that despite all the effort by the central and state governments, many people got infected and several people lost their loved ones to the illness.
“If vaccinations did not start in India on January 16, imagine how our health workers would have dealt with the second wave.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-sightedness should be commended in which he started vaccination for doctors, frontline workers and health workers in January itself,” he said.
The CM said that despite Covid-19, the state government ensured that livelihoods were not affected and during the second wave, decided to implement a Corona curfew during which essential services, industrial activity and agricultural work were allowed to continue.
“UP has a lot of potential and only needs a platform.
During the first wave, 40 lakh migrant workers returned to UP and only 10% of them went back to other states after the lockdown eased.
This March those people also returned and have found jobs here itself,” the CM said, adding that despite the largest population in the country and the most number of youth, UP had the lowest level of unemployment with the government having given employment to 1.5 crore people.
He said that for money to increase, it needs to be in circulation and therefore, to ensure that businesses continued to run, his government worked with the state level bankers committee to provide easy loans to entrepreneurs.
The CM also commended the participation of women in the self-employment programmes and said that this would strengthen the government’s Mission Shakti programme for women empowerment.
“Women have shown great enthusiasm in self-employment programs.
Today, the youth in the state is focusing on creating job opportunities rather than running after jobs.
Schemes like the PM Employment Generation Programme, Mukhyamantri Yuva Swarozgar Yojana, ODOP have provided support to the youth,” he said.