Bhubaneswar: The state government will host entrepreneurship development programmes across the state in the next one year.

The MSME department, through the district industries centres, will be conducting 500 such programmes of 12-day duration each. A similar number of daylong sensitisation programmes for motivating and empowering youth on entrepreneurship and guiding them on setting up micro and small enterprises will also be held.

These programmes would be conducted one per block, 2 per NAC/municipality and five for every municipal corporation. General managers of district industries centres have been instructed to encourage MSMEs to register under Udyog Aadhar Memorandum, Government e-Marketing and Zero-Effect-Zero-Defect for improvement of processes and products.

A review meeting was held on Friday where it emerged that during the current year, 8,711 SME units have gone into production with an investment of Rs731 crore and employment to 43,847 persons.

Under Prime Minister Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP), against the annual target of 3,088 beneficiaries, margin money (subsidy) to the tune of Rs 22.4 crore in 979 cases has been disbursed.

"Bankers have further sanctioned 179 cases involving margin money of Rs 4.5 crore. Bankers have been requested to distribute the target to all branches so that each branch sanctions and disburses PMEGP loans to at least two or three cases," said L.N. Gupta, additional secretary to the department.