Since 2020, like rest of India Inc, India’s small businesses too have been struck by one shock after another: Covid-19, supply-chain disruptions, inflation, the Russia-Ukraine war, rising energy prices, deteriorating geopolitics, Trump-tariffs and a more uncertain global trading environment.
By conventional wisdom, India’s MSMEs—small, financially constrained and often dependent on working capital—should have been among the most vulnerable cohort in the economy.
But they bucked the script.
The latest Sumpoorn Index, compiled on behalf of the Small and Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), shows small-business activity continuing to hold up.
So what explains this remarkable resilience?
Has the Indian MSME ecosystem fundamentally changed since Covid-19?
Has better access to formal credit made businesses more capable of absorbing shocks?
And is this resilience as broad-based as the headline numbers suggest?
To unpack this fascinating puzzle, StratNewsGlobal.Tech spoke to Sumita Kale, Principal Economist at Jocata, in this episode of Capital Calculus.
