Stand Up India

Starting a business needs capital, and capital needs a lender willing to take a chance on a first-time entrepreneur. Stand Up India exists to make banks say yes more often to two groups that have historically found this hardest: Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe entrepreneurs, and women entrepreneurs.

The workbook's own description is short. It is a scheme for financing SC/ST and/or women entrepreneurs above 18 years of age. Its objective is to facilitate bank loans to these groups. The loan itself is for setting up a new enterprise — in manufacturing, trading or the services sector.

Three conditions come straight from the workbook's own three lines:

1. Who it is for — SC/ST and/or women entrepreneurs, above 18 years of age.
2. What the scheme does — it facilitates a bank loan to that borrower; the scheme is a facilitation mechanism, not the lender itself.
3. What the loan is for — setting up a new enterprise, in manufacturing, trading or the services sector.

The workbook gives no loan amount, interest rate or repayment tenure for Stand Up India in this booklet — only the eligible borrower, the facilitation objective and the permitted sector. That is a shorter treatment than the workbook gives Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, its sibling business-loan scheme, in the very next entry.

Kavita, 27, in Nagpur, wants to set up a small garment-manufacturing unit — a new enterprise, not an expansion of an existing family business. As a woman entrepreneur above 18, she is exactly the borrower Stand Up India describes.

Her neighbour Ramesh, 45, wants a loan to expand a manufacturing unit his family has run for fifteen years. Two things put him outside the scheme as the workbook describes it: the business is not new, and — unless he separately qualifies as SC or ST — he is not in either of the two groups the scheme names.

Kavita approaches her bank citing the scheme; the bank still runs its own credit assessment using the 5 Cs of credit, because Stand Up India facilitates the loan, it does not remove the bank's own lending judgement.

Chapter 9 (Government Schemes) lists Stand Up India immediately after Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, in the section on borrowing-related government schemes. Expect a question that gives a borrower's profile — age, category, whether the business is new or existing — and asks whether Stand Up India applies.

• The enterprise must be new. A loan to expand or restructure an existing business is outside the workbook's description of this scheme.
• The eligible borrower is SC/ST and/or women entrepreneurs above 18 — a general entrepreneur outside these groups is not who the workbook says this scheme is for.
• Stand Up India facilitates a bank loan; it is not itself a lender or a subsidy. Compare with Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana's Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme, which pays an interest subsidy directly.
• Do not confuse this with Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY), the workbook's other business-loan scheme, organised around SHISHU, KISHOR and TARUN loan sizes for the non-corporate small business segment generally, without Stand Up India's SC/ST/women condition.
• The workbook gives no loan ceiling or interest rate for Stand Up India in this booklet — do not import a figure from outside the text.