PIB: Published on 3 July 2026
A fresh PIB release out of Delhi on July 3 puts a human face on the National SC-ST Hub (NSSH) Scheme, profiling three entrepreneurs; a fire-safety equipment maker in West Bengal, a solar installer in Assam, and a hydraulic-cylinder manufacturer in Maharashtra; whose businesses grew after going through the scheme's Business Accelerator Programme (BAP).
The tender wins cited are real but modest: ₹8.48 lakh from Power Grid Corporation, ₹5.10 lakh from SAIL, and improved market positioning for the Assam solar firm. Read on its own, the release is a feel-good story about mentorship converting into contracts. Read against the scheme's own numbers, it's a snapshot of a policy still far short of its statutory goal; but arguably closing the gap faster than at any point in its decade-long history.
The mandate behind the mentorship
The NSSH Scheme, launched by the Prime Minister in October 2016 and run by the National Small Industries Corporation under the Ministry of MSME, exists to serve a specific legal obligation: the Public Procurement Policy for Micro and Small Enterprises Order, 2012, which requires central ministries, departments and CPSEs to source at least 4% of their annual procurement from SC/ST-owned enterprises, carved out of a broader 25% MSE procurement target. That 4% figure is the yardstick against which everything else; capacity building, GeM onboarding, credit subsidies, the Business Accelerator Programme itself; is ultimately meant to deliver.
For years, the policy existed largely on paper. Government data shows procurement from SC/ST-owned MSEs stood at just 0.07% in 2015-16; effectively negligible against a 4% target that had already been in force for three years. The trajectory since has improved sharply: the Ministry's own figures put 2025-26 procurement at 1.59%, a claimed 37-fold increase in value terms (from ₹99.37 crore to ₹3,738.34 crore). More than 1.79 lakh SC/ST entrepreneurs are reported to have accessed some benefit under the scheme to date.
Reading the growth curve carefully
A 37-fold rise sounds dramatic, and in relative terms it is. But the base was so low that even a large multiple leaves the absolute share well under half the mandated target. Procurement compliance is measured in percentage terms precisely because rupee totals can be misleading; a ministry's overall procurement budget also grows year to year, so part of the crore-value increase reflects a bigger pie, not just a bigger slice for SC/ST vendors.
At 1.59% against a 4% floor, the policy is roughly 40% of the way to where it is legally supposed to be, nearly a decade after the scheme's launch and thirteen years after the underlying procurement order was notified.
The BAP case studies illustrate why the climb is slow and incremental rather than a step-change. Each of the three entrepreneurs profiled had already built a functioning business; in fire safety equipment, renewable energy installation, and precision hydraulic components; before entering the programme.
What BAP appears to have supplied was not capital or market access from scratch, but something narrower: pricing frameworks, cost-structure clarity, and tender literacy. That is a real and often underestimated barrier to public-sector selling, where L1 bidding rules, documentation requirements, and pricing-to-margin decisions can shut out technically competent but commercially inexperienced vendors.
But it also means BAP's natural constituency is enterprises that are already procurement-adjacent, not the much larger population of SC/ST micro-entrepreneurs who haven't yet reached that stage. Scaling the 1.59% figure meaningfully closer to 4% will likely require the earlier-stage interventions; Udyam registration, capital subsidy, GeM onboarding; to widen the funnel, with BAP-style accelerators converting that larger pool into tender-ready bidders.
The limits of anecdote as evidence
The three stories in this release, like similar profiles the Ministry has published in recent months, are necessarily selective: they are success cases chosen to illustrate what the programme can do, not a representative sample of outcomes across the roughly 1.79 lakh entrepreneurs who have engaged with NSSH in some form.
That's a standard feature of government communication rather than a flaw unique to this release, but it means the human stories and the aggregate 1.59% figure are answering different questions. The stories show the mechanism can work for individual firms with an existing product and market foothold; the percentage shows how far that mechanism has moved the system as a whole. Both can be true at once: a genuinely effective accelerator programme, and a procurement mandate still substantially unmet.
What to watch
Two things will indicate whether the current pace is sustainable rather than a one-off jump. First, whether the year-on-year percentage growth (not just rupee growth) continues at a similar rate, since procurement budgets themselves expand. Second, whether the Ministry starts publishing a breakdown of how many BAP graduates go on to win tenders versus how many complete training without a subsequent award; a conversion metric that would say more about the programme's real leverage than case studies alone.
