Ministry of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), the government of India, launched Scheme of Fund for Regeneration of Traditional Industries (SFURTI) in 2005 for promoting cluster development. The guidelines of SFURTI have been revised to merge the scheme with Scheme for Enhancing Productivity and Competitiveness of Khadi Industry and Artisans; Scheme for Product Development, Design Intervention, and Packaging; and Scheme for Rural Industries Service Center.

Objectives

The scheme has been launched with various objectives; few of which are as follows:

  1. Organizing traditional industries and artisans into clusters and offering support for their long-term sustainability and economic growth
  2. Providing employment opportunities to artisans and rural entrepreneurs
  3. Nurturing marketing infrastructure and marketability of products through support, design intervention, and packaging services
  4. Through professional training, enhancing the skills and capabilities of traditional artisans
  5. Based on outreach and growing marketing sector of E-commerce, ensuring E-commerce as a major marketing channel under this scheme

Beneficiaries

Under this SFURTI scheme, the following sectors and beneficiaries are covered:

Artisans, workers, machinery makers, raw-material providers, entrepreneurs, business development service providers, implementing agencies, field workers of government institutions and policymakers, etc.

Clusters would be selected according to their geographic concentration, which is nearly 500 beneficiary families of MSMEs.

Project interventions

This scheme covers three intervention types, namely, soft interventions (spreading awareness, counseling, trust-building, etc.), hard interventions (creating facilities, including common facility centers, raw material banks, warehousing facility, and training facility), and thematic interventions (cross-cutting interventions at a sector level).

Financial assistance provided for any type of intervention project is limited to a maximum of Rs. 8 crores.

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