Never-ending count

There is no official estimate of the number of MSMEs currently operating in the country

Seven decades of strenuous record-keeping and statistics-crunching by the government may not have been enough to gauge the true magnitude of the country or its people. A senior official of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) ministry told a journalist that there was no official estimate of the number of MSMEs currently operating in the country. But he conceded that counting was on. After the surprised journalist asked him exactly when the “counting” started, the bureaucrat replied with a smile: “The day after India gained independence.”