Govt sectors falter in making payments to small and medium enterprises

Shivani Bhakoo
Tribune News Service
Ludhiana, June 11

The Ministry of MSME, had come up with an idea of constituting committees that would speed up hearing of matters for early release of payments, to provide relief to the individuals and firms, payments of which were delayed.

Unfortunately, it has come to notice that most of the delayed payments are by the government departments themselves. The firm owners are running from pillar to post to get the payments released but to no avail.

The delayed payment councils were formed by the Central Government to protect the interests of the MSME’s. The idea behind these was that the MSMEs, in case of delay of any payment, may file a case in delayed payment council for the recovery of the payment. These committees are setup at district and state levels to give a wide opportunity to the MSMEs.

As per the online data of MSME Ministry, 18,491 online complaints have been filed by different MSMEs. Of these, 10,889 complaints have been registered by the delayed payment councils all over. These cases involve a delay in the payment of around Rs 4,800 crores.

But shockingly, even after more than 10 years of this act, the data have not been uploaded by many states on MSME Ministry’s website. The number of cases settled is too low as compared to the4 number of cases filed.

The president Federation of Punjab Small Industries Association (FOPSIA) Badish Jindal said the real purpose of the act is defeated when government’s own departments fail to follow it.

“The government departments themselves are violating the delayed payment act and their response is very poor during the proceedings of such cases. We have demanded that the responsible officials (whose departments fail to release the payments) should be taken to task for not releasing payment.

There is another amendment in the act that if payments are delayed for more than 45 days, the penalty of Rs 3 lakhs each will be imposed on director/directors, whose firm fails to release the payment,” said Jindal. He added that many of the local MSMEs have supplied to government departments also, whose payments are still stuck.