What is the National Small Industry Corporation, and what is its role?

What role does the National Small Industry Corporation play?

The National Small Industry Corporation, also known as NSIC, is a government agency set up by the Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises in 1955. It has an ISO 9000 certification and was set up with the main aim of helping small services and businesses and promoting their growth and development. Its primary role is to help small-scale businesses fulfill their machinery and equipment requirements. However, it also helps with other areas like marketing, financing through a business loan with competitive business loan interest rates, as well as offering technological support and more.

What is the role of NSIC?

NSIC helps the small-scale industry in many ways, such as:

1. Marketing support: Small businesses often face a lack of funds for marketing that affects their business’ popularity and customer reach. NSIC offers different marketing schemes for small businesses that can help them in selling and promoting their work. For instance, NSIC conducts exhibitions and fairs every year. The rent for these fairs is subsidized for small-scale enterprises and helps them showcase their products and services to a wider customer base.
   NSIC also offers tender marketing, where the agency applies tenders on behalf of micro and small-scale businesses.
2. Financing support: Availing of a business loan can be hard for micro and small enterprises due to strict business loan eligibility rules and high business loan EMIs. However, NSIC can help companies get financing for their operations. NSIC has signed a memorandum with financial institutions like nationalized and private banks as well as non-banking financial institutions. Under this, micro and small enterprises can apply for an MSME loan at attractive interest rates. NSIC also helps small companies with the application process like filing the form, submitting documents, using the business loan EMI calculator to ascertain the right tenure, and helping them avail low interest rates, among other things.
3. Technological support: NSIC has set up technical service centers to help small businesses with areas like product design including Computer-Aided Design (CAD), skill development, practical as well as classroom training for workers, and more. They also provide small enterprises with equipment on lease.
4. General support:Apart from the domains mentioned above, NSIC takes care of several other miscellaneous fronts, such as purchasing raw material in bulk and distributing it to small-scale industries at subsidized rates, helping small companies export their products to other countries, offering material testing facilities at labs, and giving general mentorship to micro and small companies.

To sum it up

NSIC plays a crucial role for micro, small, and medium enterprises. The agency helps in procuring credit through business loan from credible financial institutions, offers small enterprises marketing assistance, and helps these companies stay up to date with skill development classes and practical trainings. Moreover, the agency operates out of multiple branches spread across the country, including the head branch in New Delhi, making it easy for businesses to approach it.