India's nano enterprises and the struggle for formal loans

India's roughly 7.34 crore MSMEs contribute close to a third of the country's GDP, employ around 26 crore people, and account for close to half of its exports, according to a SIDBI-Crisil report published in May 2025. But blended into that number is a far larger, far less visible sector of nano enterprises, businesses so small that they aren’t considered a distinct category under most formal lending frameworks. At MSME Sparks 2026, in a masterclass titled ‘Financing the Invisible Enterprise: A P