LUCKNOW, October 7 — The Uttar Pradesh State Cabinet, presided over by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, on Wednesday approved the expansion of the Promoted Leased and Developed Grid Ecosystems (PLEDGE) Park scheme, enhancing capital incentives to spur private industrial cluster development across Tier-2 and Tier-3 urban centres.
Under the notified policy framework administered by the Department of MSME and Export Promotion, private industrial developers aggregating contiguous land parcels between 10 and 50 acres are eligible for 100 percent upfront stamp duty exemptions and soft developmental loans up to ₹50 crore at a subsidized interest rate of 1 percent per annum. In return, developers must deliver plug-and-play internal infrastructure—including internal road networks, dedicated power substations, effluent treatment plants (ETPs), and digital logistics linkages.
The ministerial directive targets the accelerated operationalization of private industrial estates across 25 non-metropolitan districts, including Aligarh, Moradabad, Gorakhpur, Ayodhya, Varanasi, and Jhansi. The state economic cell projects that the revamped policy will mobilize ₹50,000 crore in private industrial capital expenditure over the next three fiscal cycles, generating over 500,000 skilled and semi-skilled factory floor jobs linked to the state's flagship One District One Product (ODOP) value chains.
Sub-national industrial policies, MSME classification metrics under the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development (MSMED) Act 2006, industrial corridor planning, and regional employment dynamics are core topics in UPPSC State Services (General Studies Paper V and VI: Uttar Pradesh). Candidates should recall that the composite MSME classification threshold introduced in July 2020 defines Micro units (investment $\le$₹1 crore, turnover $\le$₹5 crore), Small units (investment $\le$₹10 crore, turnover $\le$₹50 crore), and Medium units (investment $\le$₹50 crore, turnover $\le$₹250 crore).