The Department of Industries, Chandigarh Administration, has launched a city-wide drive to bring 30,000 unregistered Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) into the formal economy under the Centre’s Raising and Accelerating MSME Performance (RAMP) Programme.
Deputy Commissioner Nishant Kumar Yadav, who also holds charge as Secretary Industries, said the drive was aimed at extending the benefits of formalisation to enterprises that had so far remained outside the government’s radar.
“Thousands of small businesses across Chandigarh operate without any formal recognition, which keeps them out of institutional credit and government schemes. This drive will bring them into the mainstream, at their doorstep, free of cost,” he told The Tribune.
Under the initiative, unregistered MSMEs across the city, including manufacturing units, service providers and traders, will be facilitated in obtaining free Udyam Registration, the Government of India’s official MSME recognition system.
Formalisation will make these enterprises eligible for institutional credit and flagship schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY), the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE), and the Prime Minister’s Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP), besides enhancing their market credibility.
The department has engaged Forvis Mazars LLP as the implementing agency for the drive. Trained survey teams will fan out across industrial areas, commercial markets and business clusters in the city to identify unregistered enterprises and provide free, on-the-spot facilitation for Udyam Registration.
Yadav appealed to MSME owners and traders to extend full cooperation to the survey teams. “We need accurate information from business owners for this exercise to succeed. The more enterprises we register, the stronger our local economy becomes,” he said, adding that enterprises could also contact the Department of Industries directly for assistance.
The city’s Udyam-registered units currently stand at 65,164, employing nearly 4.69 lakh people, with the RAMP programme, sanctioned at Rs 43.07 crore by the World Bank and running till March 2027, already having reached over 2,748 MSMEs through a dedicated facilitation helpdesk since its rollout last year. The department now targets nearly half as many additional units as currently exist on its books.
The move is also in line with Chandigarh’s broader ease-of-doing-business agenda, which has seen the UT’s score on the Centre’s Business Reform Action Plan rise to 89 per cent in 2025, and follows the administration’s recent proposal to extend Punjab’s Right to Business Act to Chandigarh to give businesses statutory, time-bound clearances.
