A ₹4,111 crore fund, a 0.50% annual guarantee fee, and zero additional risk premium — the Union Cabinet has just handed women and SC/ST entrepreneurs a five-year runway to build businesses on their own terms. Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary on Wednesday, 11 November 2026 welcomed the Cabinet's decision to extend the Stand-Up India scheme for another five years, calling it a critical step toward building an Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India).

What the Cabinet approved for Stand-Up India

The Cabinet, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cleared the continuation of Stand-Up India for the next five years with a dedicated corpus of ₹4,111 crore. The guarantee charge on loans will remain capped at 0.50% per annum — and critically, no extra risk premium will be levied on borrowers. CM Choudhary posted in Hindi: 'ऋण पर गारंटी शुल्क 0.50% सालाना रहेगा और कोई अतिरिक्त जोखिम प्रीमियम नहीं देना होगा' — 'The guarantee fee on loans will remain 0.50% annually and no additional risk premium will have to be paid.'

That detail matters. For a first-generation entrepreneur from a Scheduled Caste household or a woman stepping into formal credit for the first time, every basis point shaved off the cost of borrowing is the difference between a viable business and a loan that feels like a trap. The low, flat fee is a deliberate design choice to widen access.

Stand-Up India: a decade of credit-linked entrepreneurship

Launched on 5 April 2016 by the Government of India, the Stand-Up India scheme was built around a simple but powerful premise: provide composite bank loans between ₹10 lakh and ₹1 crore to SC/ST and women entrepreneurs specifically for greenfield — that is, brand-new — enterprises. The scheme targeted the structural gap in India's credit landscape where marginalised communities historically struggled to access formal institutional finance for starting businesses.

Over the first decade, the scheme operated as a credit-guarantee-backed channel through scheduled commercial banks, nudging lenders to approve loans for a demographic that conventional risk models often penalise. The five-year extension signals that the government views the instrument as still essential — that the gap it was designed to close has not yet closed.

The Aatmanirbhar Bharat connection

CM Choudhary explicitly anchored the announcement to the Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) framework — the national campaign launched in 2020 that brought together credit support, manufacturing incentives, and entrepreneurship promotion for marginalised groups under a single strategic umbrella. The framing is intentional: self-reliance, in this reading, is not just macroeconomic — it is personal and community-level, built one greenfield business at a time.

For Bihar, one of India's most populous states with a large SC/ST population, the scheme's renewal carries particular weight. State-level coordination on disbursement targets and tracking business survival rates over the extension period will be the real test of whether the renewed commitment translates into ground-level change.

Half a trillion rupees in guaranteed credit capacity, a fixed low fee, and five more years on the clock. The architecture is in place — now comes the harder work of filling it with actual businesses that last.