Why this matters
The MSME growth gap
India’s small businesses employ over 110 million people, yet contribute about 30% of GDP — well below the ~50–60% that peers get from theirs. The gap isn’t effort or entrepreneurship; it’s access to formal, scalable credit beyond what a business can pledge as collateral.
Small business as a share of GDP
Across peer economies, small business is roughly half of output. In India, about a third.
Directional, not decimal-precise — size thresholds differ by country. †Australia counts “small business” (0–19 employees) only, understating an SME total that would include medium firms. Sources: MSME Ministry / RBI (India); the “56789” formulation (China); IfM Bonn (Germany); EC Annual Report on European SMEs (EU); INEGI (Mexico); OECD (Brazil); U.S. SBA Office of Advocacy (US); ASBFEO (Australia).
~30%
India's MSME share of GDP
vs ~50–60% across China, Germany, the EU, Mexico and Brazil
₹20–25 lakh cr
Estimated MSME credit gap
RBI Expert Committee (U.K. Sinha), 2019
110M+
Jobs in India's MSME sector
second only to agriculture
What’s actually missing
Much of India’s MSME credit is collateral-secured revolving working capital — cash credit and overdraft against property and stock. That serves the asset-rich, but it caps a business at the value of what it can pledge, not the trade it actually does. Past that ceiling, the binding constraint is information.
Lenders already run diligence, increasingly against government-source data — GSTN, MCA, credit bureaus and the Account Aggregator framework. What’s still missing is a shared, consent-based way to verify trade and transaction evidence — purchase-order acceptance, buyer relationships, multi-party trade, and whether a receivable is already financed elsewhere — so each lender need not rebuild that work application by application, and cross-lender risks stay visible.
That is verification and evidence infrastructure — a public-good complement to lending, not a substitute for the lender’s judgement. Financial inclusion here is a by-product of closing the information gap.
The boundary
AssureLocker is a Technology Service Provider. It supplies verified evidence and risk signals; it does not score credit, lend, hold or move funds, or make the credit decision — the lender always decides.
Read the full economic report — the data, the comparison, and where the evidence layer fits.
Read “The MSME Growth Gap”