In the last six month there is daily news in the newspaper on the role of national chambers in the development of clusters. A new bred of stakeholders in the cluster development work is evolving due to a large chunk of funds is allocated to Clusters related activities by Government India.
Most of the National Industry Chambers suddenly activated interest in MICRO SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES (most of these Chamber don’t even have provision to make MSMEs as their members). The inorganic growth of such stakeholders also doesn’t understand the actual meaning of cluster. There is now competition among chambers to control the large amount of funds available for cluster development.
The very interesting part of the scenario is that anything and everything related to group of firms is equated to a cluster (unlike network) if CII is working with 10 companies for quality improvement they call it cluster development programme.
The cluster concept by new stakeholders in cluster development is perceived in a much narrower and very limited sense and to a great extent not even actually applying cluster development tools for actual competitiveness of the clusters.
