Visakhapatnam: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has invited suggestions and feedback from stakeholders on the Union Budget, assuring that necessary amendments will be made based on the representations received and their significance.

As part of the post-budget outreach program, the Finance Minister interacted with stakeholders, including chartered accountants, representatives of various associations, advocates, and industrialists, in Visakhapatnam on Thursday.

Addressing the gathering, Sitharaman emphasized that the budget will be finalized after incorporating inputs gathered through such engagements.

“Since 2019, the Modi government has been conducting post-budget interactions in various cities. This year, we have already held a session in Mumbai, followed by this one in Visakhapatnam,” she stated. In line with the Union Budget 2024-25 announcements, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, along with Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary, launched a new credit assessment model in Visakhapatnam on March 6. The model is designed to evaluate MSMEs’ creditworthiness based on their digital footprints. It leverages digitally fetched and verifiable data to facilitate automated loan appraisals for MSMEs, marking a shift from traditional asset or turnover-based credit assessments.

Public sector banks (PSBs) will now build in-house capabilities to assess MSMEs for credit instead of relying on external assessments. This initiative aims to streamline the loan application process by offering online application submission from any location, reduced paperwork and branch visits, instant in-principle sanctions through digital processing, seamless credit proposal processing with an end-to-end straight-through process (STP), reduced turnaround time (TAT), credit decisions based on objective data, transactional behavior, and credit history etc, she said.