New Delhi

About 30 crore landless people will get employment in the industrial corridors following amendments to the land acquisition bill, Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Wednesday.

“I want to make a special mention of poor, dalits, tribals, backwards, those who are landless. The Land Acquisition Bill we are bringing, as per that the industrial corridors which would be set up in the country, those backward people, the 300 million landless people would get employment opportunities,” he said.

Speaking at the launch of the Rs 20,000 crore Pradhan Mantri Micro Units Development Refinance Agency (MUDRA) Yojana here, he said it is the priority of the government to provide employment to people and steps are being taken in that direction.

The Finance Minister further said that the institution is an effort towards “funding the unfunded” population of the country.

There are about 5.77 crore micro and small entrepreneurs in the country who do not have access to institutional credit.

Jaitley said about 20 per cent of the country’s population is dependent on these micro and small entrepreneurs.

This institution has been created within five weeks after Budget announcement, he said, adding that the MUDRA Bank will refinance micro-finance institutions (MFIs).

This NBFC will be transformed into another development bank in the future, he added.

In his Budget speech, the Finance Minister had proposed the MUDRA with a corpus of Rs 20,000 crore, and credit guarantee corpus of Rs 3,000 crore.

The roles envisaged for MUDRA include laying down policy guidelines for micro enterprise financing business and registration of MFI entities as well as their accreditation and rating.

The initial products and schemes under this umbrella have already been created and the interventions have been named ‘Shishu’, ‘Kishor’ and ‘Tarun’ to signify the stages of growth/development and funding needs of the beneficiary micro unit/entrepreneur.

PTI