The Rs 50,000-crore Self-Reliant India (SRI) fund by the MSME Ministry and managed by the public lender State Bank of India’s (SBI) private equity arm SBICAP Ventures (SVL) has invested Rs 6,448 crore in MSMEs as of November 30, 2023. The data was shared by Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma, Minister of State in the MSME Ministry in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha on December 14.
As of January 2023,the fund had invested Rs 3,000 crore in over 140MSMEs, FE Aspire had reported.
The fund operates through a mother-fund and daughter-fund structure for equity or quasi-equity investments. NSIC Venture Capital Fund Limited (NVCFL) operates as the mother fund.
As per the information available on the NSIC Venture Capital Fund (NVCFL) website, there are 48 daughter funds viz., TATA Capital Healthcare Fund, AavishkaarIndiaFund, SVL-SME Fund, Gaja Capital India Fund, Avaana Sustainability Fund, ICICI Ventures’ India Advantage Fund S5 I and more.
SRI is a sector-agnosticfundto support MSMEs in agriculture, pharma,auto, chemicals, etc., undertaking manufacturing or services business except for investments in gambling, self-help groups, and any illegal or unlawful activities.The target return for daughter funds is a gross IRR (internal rate of return) of 12 per cent per annum.
Meanwhile, the gross bank credit deployed by scheduled commercial banks to MSMEs under priority sector lending in October stood at Rs 23.15 lakh crore, according to the latest data on sectoral deployment by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). This was 22.8 per cent higher than Rs 18.8 lakh crore deployed in October last year and 11.8 per cent more than Rs 20.6 lakh crore deployed in September this year.
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