Small businesses in India receive sustainability advice from EU

Experts from the EU and UK head to India on a mission to give green guidance to SMEs.

Green initiatives will be introduced to India following a project with backing from the UK’s Aston University and Kolkata’s Jadavpur University.

The project will bring experts from the UK and the EU to India to bring their expertise and knowledge of best practices in the supply and value chain.

"The idea is to improve small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) performance by implementing a green supply chain management model which is based on sustainability,” said Professor Prasanta K Dey of Aston Business School in an article in The Economic Times.

“This will reduce wastes and costs, improve performance with minimal or no damage to the environment,” he added.

Professor Dey outlined how the discussions will involve sharing ideas on how to create more efficient and environmentally friendly initiatives, instead of finding ground-breaking technology to utilise.

This will ensure efforts are directed to valuable business ideals like the elimination of wastes, reduction of cycle time, energy saving, and developing green productivity, to name but a few.

The pilot project will start off by mentoring and advising ten SMEs for around 18 months, with a goal to improve performance by around 20 per cent.

This new project will add to India’s recent efforts to promote the growth of SMEs, such as the announcement of a new bank to support funding for small businesses, and to drive forward the production of clean energy.

India has a goal to produce 100 gigawatts of solar power by 2022.

Its latest effort will bring business leaders and experts together “so we can learn from each other’s experiences” and will showcase “how to encourage SMEs to adopt environmental and quality management systems”, according to Professor Dey.