Exim Bank, through its Grassroots Initiative and Development (GRID) initiatives, envisages supporting globalisation of enterprises based out of rural areas of the country. The programme seeks to address the needs of relatively disadvantaged sections of society while creating expanded opportunities for traditional crafts persons and artisans, and rural entrepreneurs of the country. The Bank has consciously sought to establish, nurture and foster various institutional linkages and has entered into formal cooperation arrangements with select, broad-based organizations in order to directly reach out to the artisans and other target segments, by helping in capacity building, technological upgradation, quality improvement, market access, training and more.
Through this initiative, Bank extends financial support to promote grassroots initiatives/technologies; particularly the ones with export potential and help the artisans/ producer groups/clusters/small enterprises/NGOs, across the country realize remunerative return on their produce and finally facilitating exports from these units. The group functions like SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) and handles credit proposals from the organizations working at the rural /grassroots level and offers tailor-made financial products to cater to their needs.
The group is mandated to work towards developing a robust, vibrant and holistic approach in its intervention (helping at every stage of product development / business cycle viz. capacity building, export capability creation and expansion, diversification and finally to the exports)thus helping enterprises address the issues restricting them to make foray into exports. The broad areas of support extended by Bank, through its Grassroots Initiatives and Development (GRID) department to various organizations include, capacity building, developing common facility centres, developing raw material bank, technological intervention (technology upgradation) and creating export capability in micro and small enterprises (MSMEs), grass root rural business enterprises etc. Following sums up the objectives of this group in nutshell:
The organizations desirous of availing the facilities under GRID should fulfill the following criteria: