A CASE STUDY ON THE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF MICRO, SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES (MSMES) AT HOWRAH DISTRICT IN WEST BENGAL

The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) play a vital role in generating employment, utilizing local resources, reducing regional imbalances. The current paper is an attempt to analyse the ground reality of MSMEs at Howrah district in West Bengal on the basis of a sample survey in the district. The paper is mainly based on the primary data collected through the field survey. The study tries to find out the scenario of institutional credit support by the banks and other financial institutions to the MSMEs and rank the major problems faced by the MSMEs using Garrett's Ranking Technique. The paper argues that the percentage of institutional credit offered to the micro units is significantly less compared to the small and medium enterprises. Garrett's Ranking Technique shows that the most vital problems of MSMEs at Howrah are poor banking support, obsolete technology, competition, labor problems, infrastructural deficiency, etc