Financial stimulus must stay, says India

FM presents Corp Excel awards to 21 SMEs

“Immediately coming out of the stimulus package ... exit policy may not be the correct approach because in that case if the world economy collapses the depression would be deeper,” Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said on Wednesday at a Corporation Bank function while recalling his interactions with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama yesterday.

Later, when asked if he was hinting at gradual withdrawal of stimulus packages, Mukherjee said, “I am not hinting at anything. What I told (Japanese Prime Minister) was that we shall have to strike a balance between the requirement of the economy and the capacity of the economy to bear this level of fiscal deficit and borrowing.”

The Finance Minister said that he has told Japanese Prime Minister that countries have spent huge amount of money in stimulus packages to help the economies which has resulted in high fiscal deficit in almost every country and also greater borrowing which have propensity to leave little resources to the private sector.

The Finance Minister gave away awards to 21 outstanding micro, small and medium enterprises. The Corp Excel — National mSME Excellence Award 2008 instituted by the Corporation Bank for categories.

Novel initiative

Corp Excel award is a new initiative from Corporation Bank instituted with an objective to encourage and recognise some of the outstanding mSME entrepreneurs in the country and in the process enhance the Bank’s engagement with this sector.   

The Corp Excel Awards were instituted for ten categories each under small and medium enterprises group, as follows: food and  agro-based, textiles and apparels, machine tools and engineering, chemicals and petrochemicals, IT and  ITeS sector, auto components, drugs and  pharmaceuticals, plastics and  packaging, gems and  jewellery and others.