Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech 2025, announced that a new scheme will be launched for 5 lakh women entrepreneurs belonging to Scheduled Castes (SC) or Scheduled Tribes (ST). It also involves giving term loans up to 2 crores in the next five years for the first-time women SC- ST women entrepreneurs.
Under the scheme, the Government will also offer online-capacity building programs. The new scheme will be majorly adopted from the Stand-Up India scheme. It was launched on April 5, 2016 which was basically a loan scheme meant to empower the women entrepreneurs, especially for the SC and ST sections. This scheme was extended until 2025. It will be clear within some time that whether there will be a new scheme or it will be under this only.
The Stand-Up India scheme was aimed to facilitate loans from Scheduled Commercial banks between 1 lakh and 10 crore to at least one scheduled caste or one scheduled tribe borrower and one woman borrower per bank branch. This will set up a greenfield enterprise in the manufacturing, services or the trading sector. This also involves activities allied with agriculture.
In order to charge up the India’s women entrepreneurs and startup ecosystem, here is a blueprint laid down by the Finance minister for the economic growth and resilience of India.
She declared, “The alternate investment fund for startups has received commitments of more than Rs. 91,000 crores. These are supported by the fund of funds set up with the Government of India’s contribution of Rs 10,000 crore.” This shall bring a new support wave for innovation hubs.
A data as per the Finance Ministry until 2024, states that the loans were sanctioned to 40,002 SC women and 13,424 women under the Standup India scheme.