In India, a majority of the industrial units are small and medium enterprises (SME’s). They usually have resource constraints in the form of obsolete technologies, lack of skilled manpower and funds crunch. Thus they operate at sub-optimal levels leading to loss of valuable natural resources and an unsustainable development. Moreover these industrial units are scattered and often operate in isolation. The SME’s hold enormous potential of becoming a competitive industrial unit provided they work together in co-operation and try to follow sustainable patterns of development.

The SINET project will look at identifying the unsustainability aspects of these SME’s including their networking and the environmental, social and economic impact that the network will have on the micro-region. 

The basis for this project is the fact that it is increasingly becoming evident that business and industry's current patterns of consumption and production are not sustainable. The environmental problems created by industry stem primarily from the use of a strictly linear production process of extracting raw materials and fossil energy, processing the material and energy, and dumping the waste back into natural systems. In response to this impending crisis, an innovative new theory termed Sustainable Industrial Network (SINET) is emerging to guide industries towards sustainable production.  SINET aims to incorporate the cyclical patterns of ecosystems into designs for industrial production processes that will work in unison with natural systems.

The aim of sustainable industrial network and its application on micro regional environmental planning is to interpret and adapt an understanding of the natural system and apply it to the design of the man-made system, in order to achieve a pattern of industrialization that is not only more efficient, but which is intrinsically adjusted to the tolerances and characteristics of the natural system. An industrial system of this type will have built-in insurance against environmental surprises, because their underlying causes will have been eliminated at the design stage.  A micro-region is a distinct territorial unit with clearly marked boundaries below the regional level, but above the village level. Micro-regional environmental planning attempts to coordinate the planning activities of the various actors within a limited territorial unit.