When Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stood in the Parliament during the Union Budget 2025-26 session, she made eight promises to India's 7.69 crore small businesses. But twelve months later, six of them are yet to be implemented. That is precisely what a Rajya Sabha Parliamentary Standing Committee has documented.
The Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Industry, chaired by Tamil Nadu MP Tiruchi Siva, presented its 333rd Report to Parliament on March 11, 2026, revealing that of eight Budget 2025-26 announcements directly relevant to the MSME sector, only two have been fully operationalised.
Strikingly, both successful ones were schemes where the Ministry of MSME was itself the lead agency. The remaining six, where the Ministry plays only a supporting role, continue to languish.
The two that got done and the six that didn't
The government did deliver on two fronts: it revised MSME classification thresholds upward with a gazette notification effective April 1, 2025, and it enhanced the credit guarantee ceiling under CGTMSE from ₹5 crore to ₹10 crore with effect from the same date.
The most glaring failures are two schemes with strong equity and inclusion objectives. First, customised credit cards with a ₹5 lakh limit for Udyam-registered micro enterprises, with a target of ten lakh cards in the very first year, have been stuck at the draft stage, with only stakeholder consultations and inter-ministerial meetings to show.
Second, term loans of up to ₹2 crore for five lakh women and SC/ST first-time entrepreneurs over five years, an EFC memorandum is "under examination." Nearly twelve months after the announcement, not a single rupee has reached a single beneficiary under either scheme, as per the report.
The other four unimplemented announcements are no less important. India Post was to serve as a catalyst for rural MSME logistics, credit facilitation and service delivery for Vishwakarma artisans and women entrepreneurs. Here, inter-departmental coordination has been marked as "initiated," with the implementation framework still "evolving."
Sector-specific measures for labour-intensive industries such as toys and leather are "under formulation" at DPIIT.
Only two other initiatives, the National Manufacturing Mission under NITI Aayog and the Export Promotion Mission led by the Department of Commerce, are both at early stages of consultation. But they are still not implemented.
Rajya Sabha committee calls them out
From the 333rd Report of the Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Industry | Govt of India
The committee did not mince words as they called this a pattern that "raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of inter-ministerial coordination mechanisms."
It noted a "serious disconnect between the policy intent articulated in the Budget speech and the administrative machinery required for last-mile delivery."
MSMEs account for 31.1 per cent of India's GDP, 35.4 per cent of manufacturing output and employ 32.82 crore people in the country.
The committee strongly recommended that all pending MSME Budget announcements be operationalised within six months of the Budget presentation date, a rule it wants applied to future budgets as well.
It further demanded that the Ministry of MSME be formally designated as the nodal authority for all MSME credit-related announcements, with the power to enforce accountability on banks, and that a quarterly inter-ministerial review mechanism with clearly specified milestones and responsible agencies be put in place immediately.
