A two-day workshop on 'Business Membership Organisations (BMOs) will Lead' and their capacity-building expertise, was inaugurated at Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI), Gandhinagar on Friday.
Seventeen presidents and 25 executives from selected National Industry Associations (NIA) are participating in the workshop.
"This MSME Umbrella Programme to promote the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector in India is aimed towards strengthening the NIAs in MSME clusters. To undertake competitive as well as socially, environmentally and economically relevant initiatives that would help the clusters achieve true potential is the aim," explained EDI director, Dr Dinesh Awasthi.
As for the capacity-building programme, it has been designed for selected BMOs by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and the Foundation for MSME Clusters.
This is the first-ever project to build capacities of industry associations by providing them competent human resources which can interact with the associations effectively, emphasised Dr Awasthi.
In his special address, Dr RK Das, general manager of SIDBI, pointed out the lapses in the functioning of BMOs and the need to work upon them so as to ultimately strengthen the MSME sector.
Highlighting the major problems, he stated that the BMOs lack consistency and co-ordination among themselves which is very important as one cluster houses about two to three industry associations. "BMOs must try to reduce the gap between what they are offering and what the market demands are," Dr Das said.
