| However, availability of credit continued to be a major problem. The food park at Dankuni with provision for women's quarters and crèche was ready. |
| Over 50 acres had already been sold and another 50 acre was being readied, said Nirupam Sen, West Bengal's minister for commerce and industries. |
| Sen said the chief minister would do the inauguration of the park soon. |
| The sector, according to one estimate, needed upto Rs 4000 crore finance but the total finance available through organised channels was only Rs 700 crore. |
| This fiscal, the target was Rs 4000 crore and of this, Rs 400-500 crore would come from banks, said Meera Pande, principal secretary of Bengal's C&SSI department at a felicitation function organised by the department and the Federation of Small and Medium Industries (FOSMI). West Bengal produces the largest variety of handicrafts with 200 different types being produced by 5.5 lakh handicrafts artisans and over 6 lakh handloom counterparts, Pande said. |
| "The two big projects of cluster development include the minimum tool room and the common facility centre at Howrah and the task of improving the surgical instrument development cluster through skill development programmes and common facility centre at Baruipur in association with the government of India," Pande remarked. |
| The state government was mobilising groups of women in Murshidabad in addition to fostering skills in terra-cotta and zari to take advantage of the central government's schemes for coir and form self help groups (SHGs), Pande added. |
| There were 3.46 lakh registered C & SSI units in the state and double the number of unregistered ones. |
| The former provided employment to 22 lakh people and about 28 per cent of these units dealt with machinery and metal products, 13 per cent were in food processing and agro based industries, and 8 per cent in textiles and apparels, Pande added. According to Moinul Hassan, chairman of the West Bengal Small Industries Development Corporation Ltd (WBSIDC), the corporation was receiving a lot of proposals to set-up cluster projects with public private partnership. |
| Kolkata Municipal Corporation had 35 small industries clusters while the state government monitored around 2000 in the state. |
| The interest rate for SSI proposals till Rs 5 lakh has been reduced to 9 per cent while for projects above Rs 5 lakh the rate is 9.75 per cent, he pointed out. Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) had approved projects or refinanced them at 10.75 per cent, said S Chakraborty, director of the directorate of C&SSI, government of West Bengal. |
| Chakraborty said 83 per cent of projects had been approved and the the target for the last fiscal had been fulfiled at 101 per cent. |
| A sum of Rs 181.98 crore had been disbursed of which Rs 119 crore had been disbursed till November 2005. |
| The target for this fiscal was Rs 190-200 crore. |
| West Bengal had won national SSI awards in eight sectors, the highest for any state nationally. |
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