With the impact of the global economic slowdown on Coimbatore industries receding, more units are coming up and those already in operation are expanding.
The District Industries Centre (DIC) targeted Rs. 1.5 crore capital subsidy disbursement in 2010-2011 to the micro, small and medium-scale Enterprises (MSMEs) in Coimbatore. As many as 54 units have already received about Rs. 1 crore and 25 more claims would also get assistance by the end of March this year.
Under the scheme to give subsidy for low tension power tariff, as many as 64 units would get nearly Rs. 45 lakh this year. Since power shortage was a problem to the industries here, several MSMEs have gone in for generators and Rs. 64 lakh was disbursed to 67 units to help them purchase up to 125 KVA capacity generator sets. The DIC hoped to help totally 133 units by the end of March this year, said V. Ramasubbu, General Manager of the centre.
The DIC has identified 14 clusters here for the three-year cluster development programmes and assistance would be provided by the central and the state governments.
The district was one of the leading performers in the Unemployed Youth Employment Generation Programme. The state government provided 15 per cent of the project cost as subsidy to candidates who had a definite entrepreneurship proposal and were aged between 18 and 35 (general category). The project size should be Rs. 5 lakh for manufacturing, Rs. 3 lakh for service and Rs. 1 lakh for trade segments. The annual family income should be less than Rs. 1.5 lakh.
Special camps were held in association with the Coimbatore District Small Industries Association from January 21 to 23, 2011 and 1,573 applications were received. As many as 324 were selected and sanction letters were issued to 54 applications. The total cost of the sanctioned projects was Rs. 10 crore and the subsidy given was Rs. 1.63 crore.
Mr. Ramasubbu said the industries in the district were doing well and were making use of the central and state government schemes to improve their infrastructure
