Artisan Promotion(AP)

Overview

About AP

The front door to Artisan Promotion is not an application form. It is a loan. The Delhi Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, Minorities and Safai Karamchari Finance and Development Corporation (DSFDC) nominates artisans who are already carrying its credit, and the national apex corporation running the fair picks up the participation fee, the lodging and boarding, and a per-day stipend. An artisan who has never borrowed from DSFDC has nothing to claim here yet, however good the craft.

Artisan Promotion is marketing support, not a cash award and not a training grant. DSFDC sponsors the artisan into a fair, and the apex corporation concerned bears the participation fee, lodging and boarding and pays the stipend, according to the Artisan Promotion scheme document published by the corporation. What the artisan gets is a stall at a national exhibition, the cost of getting there, and a daily allowance while standing at it.

Which corporation is behind the nomination is the fact that decides everything about the money. DSFDC has been designated the State Channelising Agency in Delhi for six national apex corporations: NSFDC for Scheduled Castes, NSTFDC for Scheduled Tribes, NSKFDC for Safai Karamcharis, NMDFC for minorities, NBCFDC for backward classes and NHFDC for persons with disabilities, as its Citizen's Charter sets out. Your category fixes your daily allowance, your travel class and your lodging rate under that corporation's norms, and the rate sets are not the same.

One category is missing from this particular scheme, and an artisan in it should know that before spending a morning at a branch. The scheme document nominates from five categories only, and Scheduled Tribes is not among them; the corporation's About Us page drops NSTFDC from its channelising list altogether, though the Citizen's Charter keeps it. There is no published Artisan Promotion rate for a Scheduled Tribe artisan in Delhi, so that is a question for the corporation rather than for a form.

DSFDC itself is a fully owned Government of NCT of Delhi undertaking, incorporated on 29 January 1983 under the Companies Act, 1956, working out of a headquarters at Ambedkar Bhawan in Rohini and three zonal offices that between them cover Delhi's eleven revenue districts (About Us, DSFDC). Artisan Promotion sits at the end of the corporation's loan schemes and application forms list, after the composite loan, Dilli Swarojgar Yojna, the transport and education loans, the big loan and the training scheme, which is a fair description of where it belongs: a service for people who are already inside those products.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Applications here have no season; the exhibitions do. In place of a window the document prints the annual circuit DSFDC nominates artisans into, with the slot each fair usually occupies.

Read those as recurring slots rather than as this year's confirmed dates, and note that only three of the four carry a venue at all. Since no opening or closing date exists to work back from, the timing question worth asking a branch is a different one: how many weeks before a given fair it wants a completed file in hand.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Two conditions do the real filtering: the artisan must have taken a loan from DSFDC, and must live in Delhi. Everything else on the list is paperwork that can be arranged.

The MSME condition is where the document has aged. It asks for online registration at www.udyogaadhar.gov.in, and the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises has since closed that route. Its circulars and orders index lists the last step as the extension of Udyog Aadhaar Memorandum validity up to 30 June 2022; the notification behind that entry, S.O. 2134(E) of 6 May 2022, simply substitutes that date into the original Udyam notification S.O. 2119(E) of 26 June 2020, and no later extension of that validity appears on the index. The Ministry now states on the Udyam Registration portal that anyone holding an EM-II or UAM registration has to re-register, that the process is free of cost and paperless, and it runs a separate UAM Migration to Udyam door for the purpose. Migrate before you fill the form, because the branch will ask for a registration certificate.

There is also a condition hiding in a place applicants do not look. For minority-category artisans the caste certificate or affidavit is listed under eligibility in the scheme document, not under documents, which makes it a test rather than an attachment.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

No group is barred by name anywhere in the scheme document, and the corporation has issued no separate list. The one restriction that does exist is buried in a table heading rather than stated as a rule: the NSFDC rates printed for the Scheduled Castes category are the norms for new beneficiaries, qualified in brackets as first timers only. Nothing in the document says what a Scheduled Caste artisan is paid on a second nomination, so a repeat participant from that category should settle the rate at the branch before booking a fare (Artisan Promotion scheme document). The four other category tables carry no equivalent qualifier.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nomination is the unit here, and it is spent on one fair. The allotment letter names a scheduled fair or exhibition, and an artisan who wants a stall at the next one applies again from the beginning; the document describes no continuation test, no performance condition carried over from the last stall, and no standing list an artisan stays on between exhibitions. What does carry across cycles is the two things that put you in the queue in the first place, the live loan account with DSFDC and a current MSME registration, and both of those are maintained outside this scheme.

What you get

Award & benefits

The five categories are paid under five different sets of apex-corporation norms, so what an artisan actually receives depends on which corporation is behind the nomination. The table below reads the scheme document across categories rather than down it.

Two rows behave differently from the rest, and both differences cost money. The minority rate is one consolidated figure covering boarding and lodging for one person, so nobody travels with the artisan on the corporation's account; and the minority fare is written as one side, where every other category is reimbursed to and fro. A minority-category participant is therefore paying a return fare out of a scheme that funds the outward leg. Travel is also evidenced unevenly. The Scheduled Castes, minority and Other Backward Classes rates are all written against production of original tickets, so the fare leaves the artisan's pocket first and returns as a claim; the Safai Karamchari and disability entries name a fare, a route and a cap without saying what proof settles them.

• The Corporation provides opportunities for artisans to participate in fairs and melas organized by different National Apex Corporations.
• Stipend for Beneficiaries from Scheduled Castes Category
• Daily Allowance (DA) for Participant: ₹150/- per day
• DA for Attendant/Spouse: ₹100/- per day
• Travel Allowance (TA): Actual train fare by sleeper class or bus fare (on production of original tickets)
• Hotel Accommodation: ₹200/- per day (Male), ₹300/- per day (Female)
• Luggage/Transportation: ₹500/-
• Stipend for Beneficiaries from Minority Category
• DA for Participant: ₹1200/- per day (maximum for boarding & lodging for one person only)
• TA: Actual train fare by sleeper 2nd class or bus fare (on production of original tickets) one side.
• Other Backward Class Category: Reimbursement of to and fro 2nd Class journey by train/bus fare against the original tickets to participant and one helper.
• ₹150/- per day as daily allowance to the participant.
• Maximum ₹500/- towards freight charges for the luggage.
• Stipend for Beneficiaries from Safai Karamcharis Category
• To and Fro 2nd Class train ticket fare/bus for the shortest route & reasonable coolie charges.
• DA: ₹150/- per day per member.
• Lodging facility will be provided by the NSKFDC or ₹250/- per day, per member.
• Local conveyance: ₹100/- per day per member or transport provided by NSKFDC.
• Stipend for Beneficiaries from Persons with Disabilities (PwDs) Category
• ₹500/- per day (including attendant).
• To & Fro 2nd Class fare of Train or Bus and maximum ₹6000/-.
• Boarding & Lodging: ₹500/- per day.

What to prepare

Documents required

The document list and the application form ask for different things, and the form is the harder of the two. The prescribed application form wants the name of the traditional craft practised, the years of prior experience in it, annual income from that craft, any national or state award held, the MSME Udyog Aadhar registration number, and a bank account with IFSC code and branch address, which it allows to be a self-help group's account rather than an individual's. It also asks a question that shapes your stall rather than your file: whether the artisan is willing to demonstrate the craft at the exhibition.

Getting the form costs nothing. DSFDC issues forms free of cost from all three branch offices as well as the headquarters, and each branch runs an Entrepreneur Guidance Cell for exactly this kind of enquiry (Citizen's Charter). One item is worth confirming before you buy the paper: the English text of the scheme document asks minority-category applicants for an affidavit on non-judicial stamp paper of appropriate value, while the Hindi text of the same file names a Rs 10 stamp paper. Ask the branch which value it is accepting.

Step by step

How to apply

There is no portal and no login. The corporation publishes the form as a downloadable PDF, and the completed set goes across a counter at the office that covers your district. DSFDC splits Delhi three ways: the Central Zone branch at 2-Battery Lane, Rajpur Road takes the Central, North, New Delhi, South and South East districts; the Mangol Puri branch office, which sits at Ambedkar Bhawan in Rohini alongside the headquarters, takes West, North West and South West; and the Nand Nagri branch at Bunkar Vihar takes East, North East and Shahdara (Contact Us, DSFDC).

Then comes the part nobody plans for: there is nothing to refresh. DSFDC operates no application-status page for this scheme, and its notice board carries auctions of condemned vehicles and scrapped items, calls for FDR reinvestment rates and a workshed allotment at Raghubir Nagar, but no call for artisan nominations to any fair. The signal that your file has moved is the allotment letter, issued to a selected candidate for a named fair. Until it arrives the only status check is a person: the branch holding the file, or its Entrepreneur Guidance Cell, which works from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Citizen's Charter).

How winners are picked

Selection process

DSFDC publishes no marks, ranking or merit rule for choosing among applicants. The scheme document says only that artisans are nominated from the five eligible categories, and that an allotment letter follows selection for the scheduled fair or exhibition.

What it does spell out is what the selected artisan has to carry. Under the apex corporation's norms the candidate takes original identity proof and three passport-size colour photographs to the fair, which is one more photograph than the application file needed. Minority-category participants are additionally expected to carry a bill book, and preferably a digital sale machine, so that sales at the stall can be recorded (Artisan Promotion scheme document).

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The conditions that bind a participant are scattered through the scheme document rather than gathered into a terms sheet, and three are worth reading before a fare is booked. Travel is reimbursed against original tickets, which makes keeping the physical ticket a condition of payment and not merely good practice. The rate that applies is the apex corporation's norm for your category rather than a DSFDC rate, so a revision at the national corporation changes what you receive without a word of the Delhi document changing. And the document exists in two languages that do not say identical things: beyond the stamp-paper value, the Hindi text of the minority fare drops the one side qualifier the English text carries, and its Safai Karamchari entries omit the alternative of lodging and transport being provided in kind by NSKFDC. The file carries no date and no revision number in either language (Artisan Promotion scheme document), which is the strongest argument for confirming the current figures at a branch before committing to a fare.

Get help

Contact

The corporation's headquarters is at Ambedkar Bhawan, Institutional Area, Sector-16, Rohini, Delhi-110085, and its email is dsfdcdelhi@gmail.com. Dial with care: the Contact Us page gives the head office numbers as 27574377 and 27574321, while the footer of every page on the same site prints 27574521 and 27574377. Enquiries about a specific file are better taken to the zonal office that covers your district in any case, and each branch publishes its own number and email address on that page.

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

Read this

Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Scheme details are compiled from myScheme, the Government of India’s official scheme-discovery platform, and are reproduced without alteration. Amounts, deadlines and eligibility change between cycles, so always confirm on the official links above before applying. Expertie does not process applications or charge fees.

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References

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