By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, FEB 05, 2021: THE Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) announced on Thursday it is partnering with online food ordering platform Zomato to onboard street food vendors across six cities under the Prime Minister Street Vendor's Atmanirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) Scheme.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Mr Sanjay Kumar, Joint Secretary, MoHUA and Mr Mohit Sardana, Chief Operating Officer of Zomato.

As per the MoU, 300 street food vendors in Bhopal, Ludhiana, Nagpur, Patna, Raipur and Vadodra will be trained on using the Zomato platform.

Zomato will provide PAN and FSSAI registrations, technology training on using the mobile app, digitise menu and prices, train and certify vendors in food safety and hygiene, packaging, as part of the training process.

MoHUA, which had entered a similar MoU with Swiggy in October last year, said the initiative will be expanded to 125 cities in phases.

The PM SVANidhi Scheme was launched in June, 2020 under the ambit of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan . It aims at facilitating collateral free working capital loans of upto Rs. 10,000 of a year's tenure, to about 50 lakh street vendors to restart their business post COVID-19 lockdown.

Incentives in the form of interest subsidy of 7 per cent per annum on regular repayment of loan, cashback of up to Rs. 1,200 per annum on undertaking prescribed digital transactions and eligibility for enhanced next tranche of loan have also been provided.

The ministry said it has received more than 36.4 lakh loan application under the scheme as on Thursday, sanctioned over 18.8 lakh loans and disbursed more than 14.04 lakh loans.

Further, MoHUA has launched the mobile application for PMSVANidhi se Samriddhi for the socio-economic profiling of SVANidhi beneficiaries and their families in 125 cities to assess their eligibility and then link them to various Central government welfare schemes.