Lastly, I would emphasize the role of banks that is crucial for the development of SMEs, given their critical positioning and greater capacity in terms of their outreach and availability of funds. The actual statistics for lending to SMEs are not satisfactory in recent years.
Bank credit to SMEs has declined over the last 4 years from Rs 437 billion in 2007 to Rs 248 billion on June, 2012. With this decline, the SMEs’ loan proportion to the total advances of banks has also decreased from 16 percent in 2007 to less than 8% percent in 2012.