Most MSME owners in Assam know subsidies exist. Very few know what they actually qualify for. The gap between those two states is not really a policy failure — the rates are published, the district classifications are in the gazette, the scheme logic is derivable from the notifications if you are willing to spend a few hours with the PDFs. What has been missing, as far as we know, is something that takes those published parameters and turns them into a usable output for a manufacturer who has a project in front of them and wants a directional number before deciding whether to invest time in a formal application.
That is what the Assam Industrial Incentive Estimator is built to do — with some important limits baked in by design.
What the tool does
The tool takes six project inputs and runs them against 15 incentive schemes, returning estimates where the calculation is defensible and flagging everything else for review.
The six inputs are:
- District — determines your UNNATI category (A at 20%, B at 25%, C at 30%) and feeds district-specific eligibility checks across state schemes. If you are unsure why this matters, the UNNATI 2024 guide has the full district breakdown.
- Sector — determines eligibility for electronics-specific programmes. A general manufacturing unit and an electronics unit at identical capex can have very different claimable totals.
- Project type — new unit or expansion. Several scheme components are restricted to new units, so this changes the output materially.
- Plant and machinery cost (₹ Cr) — the base for capital investment calculations under UNNATI CII and NEIDS CCIIAC. Building cost is collected separately because the central schemes compute incentives on P&M only, not civil works.
- Building cost (₹ Cr) — included in total project cost (and therefore in the benefit-to-cost ratio) but not in scheme calculations directly.
- Year 3 headcount — feeds the employment-linked scheme components under AIDP and UNNATI MSLI.
The output covers UNNATI 2024 (CII, CIS, MSLI), NEIDS 2017 (CCIIAC, working capital interest, insurance, GST reimbursement, income tax, transport), Assam Industrial and Development Policy (SGST, power, employment), and three electronics-specific programmes (ECMS 2025, Assam ESDM, Assam Semiconductor Package).
For a new general manufacturing unit in Kamrup Metro with ₹2 Cr in plant and machinery and 30 employees by year three, the calculator returns ₹0.8 Cr to ₹1.2 Cr across three schemes with hard estimates. Nine more schemes surface as requiring detailed review — because they depend on data the tool does not collect.
Why some schemes show “in review” instead of a number
This is the deliberate part.
Schemes like NEIDS GST reimbursement, UNNATI CIS, AIDP SGST, and the working capital interest subsidy are all computed against actual filings — your GSTR-3B data, your term loan sanction letter, your annual insurance premium invoices, your freight records. The calculator has none of that. Surfacing an estimate for those schemes would require inventing assumptions about your tax liability and loan structure, and the resulting number would feel authoritative without being so.
An MSME that sees “₹1.8 Cr across 12 schemes” and plans hiring, capex, and working capital around that figure — when the number was built on invented assumptions — is not better informed than one that never ran a calculator. They are worse off because they have false confidence. The “in review” flag exists precisely to avoid that outcome.
The schemes that do return hard estimates — UNNATI CII, NEIDS CCIIAC, AIDP Employment, and the electronics capital components — are calculable from published policy rates and the six inputs the tool collects. A ₹5 Cr P&M project in Morigaon (Category C) yields ₹1.5 Cr in UNNATI CII at the published 30% rate, and the tool returns exactly that. Not a range with invented uncertainty — the rate is in the gazette.
How the engine was built
The calculation engine is a set of pure TypeScript functions that run entirely in the browser — no API calls, no server round-trips. Scheme parameters are derived from the published policy notifications: UNNATI 2024 rates from the DPIIT gazette, NEIDS rates from the 2017 notification and subsequent amendments, AIDP employment figures from the Assam Industrial and Development Policy 2023.
The district-to-category mapping is the most consequential single piece of data in the tool. We mapped it directly from the UNNATI 2024 notification rather than from secondary summaries, because the secondary summaries we found in circulation had errors. If you are setting up a unit and the district classification is determining site selection, cross-check this against the primary source — the factory setup playbook covers the site selection and land process in detail.
The output range — low and high — uses a -25%/+15% band around the midpoint estimate. This reflects documentation variability, verification timing, and disbursement-cycle variance, not uncertainty about the policy rate itself. Whether your claim clears first-pass or requires resubmission shifts the effective received amount by a real margin. If you want to understand what drives that variance, Claiming What’s Yours is the place to start.
The benefit-to-cost ratio in the output is the estimated incentive total expressed as a percentage of total project cost (P&M plus building). It is not a return on investment figure — it measures what the policy stack is worth relative to capital deployed. A 40% reading means approximately ₹40 is theoretically recoverable through scheme claims for every ₹100 of capex.
What the tool cannot replace
The calculator is a starting point, not a substitute for a proper assessment. Here is what it does not do.
It does not adjudicate stacking conflicts. UNNATI CII and NEIDS CCIIAC both provide capital investment incentive and may be mutually exclusive for the same capex tranche. The tool flags this but does not resolve it — resolution requires reading both notifications against the specific project timeline. The 14 approvals guide is useful context on how the approvals layer on top of each other.
It does not account for land status. UNNATI CII requires verified land tenure — a clear patta or a long-term lease of minimum 30 years. Plots with disputed title, annual leases, or conversion pending are ineligible regardless of how much machinery sits on them. The tool assumes land is clean.
It does not model disbursement timing. UNNATI incentives are paid in tranches over 5 to 10 years, each with compliance requirements attached. The tool shows the total claimable envelope, not the present value of a staged payment stream with annual documentation obligations.
It does not compute the filing-linked schemes. GST reimbursement under NEIDS, SGST reimbursement under AIDP, and income tax reimbursement under NEIDS are proportional to your actual tax outgo. Without your filings, any number is invented.
It does not check negative list eligibility. Certain sectors are explicitly excluded from specific scheme components. If your sector has a negative list issue under UNNATI or NEIDS, the tool will not catch it.
UNNATI registration is open until 30 September 2026. However, the scheme can close registrations for specific states before that date if committed liabilities reach 115% of the scheme outlay — this has happened under predecessor schemes. Verify current availability at unnati.dpiit.gov.in before building an application timeline around the deadline.
What to do after you run the numbers
If the output shows ₹50 lakh or more in probable incentives, the next step is a verified assessment — not another calculator.
A verified assessment recomputes the same schemes against your actual balance sheet, term loan sanction, EPF records, and land documents. It adjudicates the stacking questions, checks your sector against the negative and positive lists for each scheme, and produces a document-ready file you can take to the DIC.
The free calculator tells you whether pursuing this is worth your time. The verified assessment tells you exactly what you can claim and what you need to do to get there.
Run the calculator and share the scenario link when you reach out for a detailed review.