A report by the department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Industry tabled in Rajya Sabha recommended the Government to “immediately come out with a larger economic package aimed at bolstering demand, investment, exports and employment generation to help the economy, including MSMEs.”
The report says that even as the Government had announced a stimulus package last year for the economic revival post-Covid, it has been “found to be inadequate as the measures adopted were more of loan offering and long-term measures instead of improving the cash flow to generate demand as immediate relief.”
The report noted that in the process of economic recovery post-first wave of the pandemic, the second wave even more vigorously ripped the economy particularly the MSME sector.
It is pertinent to mention here that a large chunk of textile and apparel industry badly suffered during the first and second wave of Covid. And it faced loss of around US $ 31 billion. Notably, MSME is around 70 per cent of Indian textile and apparel industry.
The Government had last year launched the Rs. 3 lakh crore Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) — as part of the Rs. 20 lakh crore stimulus package – equivalent to 10 per cent of India’s GDP – to help MSMEs recover from the Covid impact.
The scheme’s limit was recently enhanced to Rs. 4.5 lakh crore. The Committee noted that based on the written replies by the Ministry, no intensive study has been conducted by the Ministry of MSME to ascertain the actual losses suffered by the sector due to the lockdown.
The second wave, in fact, exposed the vulnerabilities of MSMEs like never before and highlighted the problems faced by them such as delayed payments, high informality, low financial resilience, scarcity in raw material availability, etc. “A detailed study needs to be conducted to make an assessment of the actual losses suffered by the MSME sector so as to chalk out an effective plan for revival of the MSME sector.”
Bharat Tex Special Report 2026 
