PM SVANidhi app launched to provide micro-loans for street vendors

NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) launched the PM Street Vendor’s Atmanirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) App on Friday, July 18, to bring micro-credit facility for street vendors at their doorsteps. Durga Shanker Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA, said the App aims to provide a user-friendly digital interface for lending institutions (LIs) and their field functionaries for sourcing and processing loan applications of street vendors under the scheme. He added that the App is a move to improve the use of digital technology and will enable field functionaries of LIs, such as the Banking Correspondents (BCs) and Agents of Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs)/ Micro-Finance Institutions (MFIs), who have proximity with the street vendors, to ensure maximum coverage of the Scheme.

MoHUA said that the launch of the mobile application would accelerate the scheme’s implementation strategy and encourage paper-free digital access of micro-credit facilities by street vendors. The PM SVANidhi web portal was launched by MoHUA on June 29, 2020. The App has similar features like vendor search in the survey data, e-KYC of applicants, processing of applications, and real-time monitoring. It can be easily downloaded from Google Play Store for use by the LIs and their field functionaries.

More than 1,54,000 street vendors have applied for working capital loan across States and Union Territories since the lending process under PM SVANidhi began on July 2, out of which, the loan has been sanctioned to over 48,000 street vendors, the MoHUA said. On June 1 of this year, the government launched PM SVANidhi to provide street vendors with an affordable working capital loan to restore their living conditions adversely affected by the COVID-19 lockdown. This scheme is aimed at benefiting more than 50 lakh street vendors who had been vending on or before March 24, 2020, in urban areas. Under the scheme, vendors can avail up to Rs 10,000 of working capital loans, which can be paid back in monthly instalments during the one-year time period and the early repayment of the loan does not entail any fine. The program encourages digital transactions with rewards through cash back of up to Rs 100 a month.