DBS Bank India has joined with social enterprise Haqdarshak. The move is to facilitate recovery of Indian businesses through Haqdarshak’s newly launched platform. The newly launched platform provides access to MSME-focused government-assisted schemes over the country.
The business owners needed support to tide through the uncertainty due to the slowdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and build resilience. The worst affected areas were small and medium scale enterprises. By understanding, the situation Haqdarshak developed a new platform for MSME-centralized government prosperity schemes. The platform aims at covering registrations, applications and documentation for financing. DBS empowered Haqdarshak to carry on serving their recipients and the wider MSME community.
In 2018, DBS Foundation provided a grant to Haqdarshak for its citizen-focused platform under DBS Foundation’s annual Social Enterprise (SE) Grant. In current year social ventures were struggling to meet their impact and financial goals during the pandemic just like other businesses. For providing additional funding to the past grant awardees DBS Foundation established a Business Transformation and Improvement (BTI) Grant. This is an effort by DBS to stand by their supported enterprises in this difficult time thereby these enterprises could secure jobs, as well as a pivot in search of new income streams.
The first platform was designed to assure that society can approach apply for government and private welfare schemes. The Haqdarshak recognized this as an opportunity to provide application support services to business owners for availing the right schemes with COVID-19 and the introduction of various MSME-focused government relief measures.
Haqdarshak got Rs0.27cr as a grant from DBS Foundation’s BTI to expand into the segment. The information from SIDBI Loan Scheme for MSMEs, Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme, Prime Minister Street vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi Yojana, etc were available through the new platform. Haqdarshak aims to reach 1,00,000 MSMEs with this initiative. The platform aims to support 10 lakh jobs annually. DBS India provides online credit solutions through a digital platform- DBS Digital Business Loans. The initiatives help them to augment working capital and meet operational liabilities in the current crisis.
