SIDBI and CRISIL today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to launch CriSidEx, India’s first Sentiment Index for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) that will indicate the current state and expected outlook on the MSME sector every quarter. The Memorandum was signed by Ms Ashu Suyash, MD and CEO, CRISIL Ltd., and Shri Mohammad Mustafa, Chairman and Managing Director, SIDBI.

The Sentiment Index is expected to provide crucial insights into employment, business environment and foreign trade. Data on MSMEs comes with a significant lag, so there is no way to regularly aggregate and assess the ground situation amongst wide range of disparate enterprises spread across India.
 

Ms. Ashu Suyash mentioned, “Effective policy making is a function of the quality of information at hand and given the government’s agenda of ensuring inclusive growth, a leading indicator that reflects the business predicament and tidings of the MSME sector is crucial. CriSidEx is designed to do exactly that because it will gather real-time, ground-level information directly from the MSMEs.”

Every quarter, the CriSidEx survey will cover over 1,000 MSMEs using a structured questionnaire to ensure consistency in methodology and capture information sans significant deviations. The sample will have representation based on size, geography and nature of business and across different legal entities.

Apart from the government and MSMEs themselves, the survey and CriSidEx will provide intelligence and insights for regulators, trade bodies, lenders as well as economic & financial analysts.
 

Importantly, CriSidEx will help in forecasting the business environment because it will capture sentiment on various business parameters such as the business situation, capacity utilisation, order book and margins. It will flag potential headwinds and changes in production cycles and thus help improving market efficiencies.

According to Shri Mustafa, “CriSidEx will allow stakeholders, especially policy makers, to take timely, even proactive – steps, including those based on early warnings thrown up by the survey. Given the significance of the MSME sector to India’s economy, the survey and CriSidEX will help in various policy inputs in future.”
 

Additionally, by capturing the sentiment of exporters and importers, the survey will give actionable feedback on foreign trade, too. The CriSidEx survey will also cover lenders, including scheduled commercial banks, non-banking finance companies and co-operative banks.
 

The results of the survey and CriSidEx levels will be published soon after every quarter. The first of these will be published in January 2018. Over a period of time CriSidEx will become the benchmark for assessing activity levels and progress in the MSME sector.