It’s difficult to avoid the context of the COVID-19 pandemic while discussing any aspect of our lives now. With the economy (and our life) having lost a quarter of a year to the lockdown that was imposed to contain the pandemic, a view on the importance of the MSME sector naturally gets tagged to the reality that is the pandemic.

And the coronavirus behind COVID-19 reminds us how, without MSMEs - the micro, small and medium enterprises - we would still be struggling to meet the sudden and huge demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) that is so crucial for doctors and healthcare workers who are in the frontline of the battle. At the end of March this year, when the first lockdown was announced, there was an acute shortage of PPE for healthcare staff. Sanitisers vanished from medicine stores, as did handwash soaps. As the lockdown snapped the national supply chain infrastructure, there was a cry of anguish and helplessness all around.

But it did not take months to fix the supply crisis. Stores managed to stock up with fresh supplies, we started going out with masks on our faces and sanitisers in our bags, and doctors got their supplies of PPEs. It happened not because the big industries swung into action, but because local MSMEs got into the act to meet the national challenge head on. Local inventory and local transport got strung together into a singular act while the nation got busy to settle the countrywide supply chain issue.

Statistics and data do not always reflect reality. We knew that MSMEs are the second-largest employment generators in India after agriculture, and that MSMEs account for half of India’s exports, but the pandemic showed us how nimble this sector is in responding to drastic changes in market reality.

We realise now that we need to be self-reliant in manufacturing, and it is up to the MSMEs to rise to the challenge. We need to ramp up production capabilities, and very fast. Achieving the target through large-scale industries - that too in the present state of the economy and physical distancing constraints imposed by the pandemic - seems an extremely challenging task. But, with proper support and some handholding, MSMEs may be the logical hope that we have in ensuring that India overcomes the challenges.

This is the only sector that is nimble enough to rise to the occasion as we saw in the early days of the pandemic.