Saurabh Gupta | 02 Aug, 2008
Indian SMEs need to understand that technology will play an important role in the sustainable development of SMEs and to stay competitive in global market.

This was stated by Anjan Das, Senior Director, CII, during the launch of a project for Capability Building to Enhance Exports Competitiveness & Facilitating Market Access for Indian Technologies/ Technology intensive products/ services and projects in the national capital.

"India's global competitive index is 48 and technology index is 62. When we see these figures I think there is a fear. It is the drawback of our industry that India's research and development (R&D) investment is hardly 0.8 percent of our GDP, which is lower than some of Asian countries also. And it so alarming that private sector investment of this 0.8 percent is only 2 percent and rest is the government even today," said Anjan Das.

"So I think these are the figures that we need to look at in different way. India's high technology exports is very minimum. At the same time you should look at the other side - today there are several government schemes and funds which are either not availed or lying in the coffers. Whether it is technology development, commercialization, upgradation, whatever you ask for, it is there, but in the same time the figures portray a different story altogether. The figures make me think that there is something wrong with our SMEs," said Anjan Das.

"Whenever we speak about technology for MSMEs I think there is a problem. It is very difficult to connect technology to the business and also very-very difficult to understand the problem," he said.

"And so there is a need of such kind of research for the well being of MSMEs," he added.

Technology Export Development Organisation (TEDO) an initiative of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) has launched this project for Capability Building to Enhance Exports Competitiveness & Facilitating Market Access for Indian Technologies/ Technology intensive products/ services and projects.

The Centre for the Promotion of Imports from Developing Countries (CBI), an agency of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands is the knowledge partner for this project.

The project aims to enhance Export Competitiveness in select sectors (Auto Components, Tools & Dies, Casting and Forgings, Process Plant and Machinery, Engineering Services and Agro and Food Processing) to Access EU Market by providing capability building (techno-managerial-marketing) support by TEDO-CBI consultants (who are trained on Export Competitiveness and Market Access by CBI experts would be attached with each selected SME for the project Execution) and also facilitating export of technology intensive products, services and projects to the European Market.

"I would like to say that this is not going to affect all, but will give a successful model for the technological development of Indian SMEs," said Anjan Das.

Meanwhile at the same occasion Patrick Gouka, Sr. Programme Manager, CBI, The Netherlands also supporting this project said: "European market is completely different form Indian market and so Indian SMEs need to look in that way to grab the opportunity."

"If I look at Indian SMEs, I found that they have build a competences, knowledge, skills about how to support there enterprises. And they just need a path finder," he added.

The other key speakers are: P K Dash, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Commerce; T V Raghunath, Consultant TEDO and Ashwani Gupta, Advisor, DSIR, Ministry of Science and Technology.