RURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Dr D Chakraborty (dipanjan_999@rediffmail.com)

India lives in her villages— this axiom is still true today despite the service sector is budding in urban and semi-urban areas. The majority of the population still lives in rural India and a large chunk of the population in urban areas still live through the learning of village life. For the strength of the country, there is a necessity to develop the villages. The development of a country is a choice loaded on its people, whether urban or rural. It is individuals who shape up a society and decide its progress and performance. Urban and rural are two sides of the same coin of economic development. While the urban sector has witnessed phenomenal growth and development, fuelled by the post-independence era of industrialization, the rural sector saw little corporate growth. The north-eastern region of the country is poised for a major economic leap along with the rest of the country. The development of rural entrepreneurship is considered to be a panacea for harnessing vast untapped human resources. Rural progress depends on industrialization. For the development of the rural economy, India needs the foundation of industrialization in the rural areas; it is ensuring the utilization of existing resources and the exploiting of various hidden potentialities. It can be said that growth in rural India can only be supported by the growth of rural entrepreneurship, which alone has the unique capacity of creating jobs through the successful emergence of small and micro ventures.

The terms 'entrepreneurship' and 'entrepreneur' are not new to the Indian economy. Often these two terms are considered synonymous and used interchangeably. But conceptually both the terms are different. The relationship between the two is just like the two sides of the same coin. The understanding of the concept of entrepreneurship owes a lot to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter and the Austrian School of economics. According to Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation. Entrepreneurship forces "creative destruction" across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products and business models and eliminating others. In this way, creative destruction is largely responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth. The entrepreneur is the kind of person that is willing to put his career and financial security on the line for an idea, spending his time and capital in an uncertain venture. Entrepreneurship as a stabilizing force limits entrepreneurship to reading markets disequilibria, while entrepreneurship defined as owning and operating a business, denies the possibility of entrepreneurial behaviour by non-owners, employees and managers who have no equity stake in the business. Therefore, the most appropriate definition of entrepreneurship that would fit into the rural development context argued here, is the broader one, the one which defines entrepreneurship as: "a force that mobilizes other resources to meet unmet market demand", "the ability to create and build something from practically nothing", "the process of creating value by pulling together a unique package of resources to exploit an opportunity".

Rural development is more than ever before linked to entrepreneurship. Institutions and individuals promoting rural development now see entrepreneurship as a strategic development intervention that could accelerate the rural development process. Rural entrepreneurship can be defined as entrepreneurship emerging at the village level which can take place in a variety of fields of endeavour such as business, industry, agriculture and acts as a potent factor for economic development, In short, rural entrepreneurship implies rural industrialization consisting mainly of agro-based industries, khadi and village industries and cottage industries. For a living, most of the rural people in developing countries primarily depend on agriculture. If the farmers who have investible surplus generated from agriculture are willing to invest in non-farm entrepreneurship then the rural economy can find an industrial route to development. So it is necessary to be familiar with the multidimensional aspect of rural entrepreneurship. The promotion of rural entrepreneurship is vital in the context of generating gainful employment and minimizing the widening of disparities between rural and urban populations. About 75% of the population who lives in villages has to utilize the village resources and they are plentifully available and people are not utilizing them effectively due to mass illiteracy. The risk aversion people can be transformed into risk-taking innovative entrepreneurs by proper training. Rural entrepreneurship not only concentrates on the enhancement of products by use of local force or by artisans but also has significant environmental and social impact by developing an eco-friendly and appropriate solution to local problems. Furthermore, institutions and individuals seem to agree on the urgent need to promote rural enterprises; development agencies see rural entrepreneurship as an enormous employment potential; politicians see it as the key strategy to prevent rural unrest; farmers see it as an instrument for improving farm earnings; and women see it as an employment possibility near their homes which provides autonomy, independence and economic empowerment. To all these groups, however, entrepreneurship stands as a vehicle to improve the quality of life for individuals, families and communities and to sustain a healthy economy and environment. Rural enterprises are important as they require low capital costs but help in raising the real income of the people. They also contribute significantly to the development of agriculture and urban industries. The entrepreneurial orientation to rural development accepts entrepreneurship as the central force of economic growth and development. However, the acceptance of entrepreneurship as a central development force by itself will not lead to rural development and the advancement of rural enterprises. What is needed in addition is an environment enabling entrepreneurship in rural areas. The existence of such an environment largely depends on policies promoting rural entrepreneurship. The effectiveness of such policies in turn depends on a conceptual framework about entrepreneurship, i.e., what it is and where it comes from. The Government has implemented numerous schemes to support and develop rural industries and to provide credit and financial assistance, skill development training, technological and quality up-gradation, infrastructure development and marketing assistance. The Government has initiated new schemes for rural entrepreneurship development besides the old ones. Some major schemes and initiatives by the Ministry of MSME, GOI are PMEGP, CLSS, CGTMSEs, ASPIRE, ESDP, GVY SFURTI, MSE-CDP etc. But these schemes have not produced the desired results. The poor and uneducated people are scared to approach banks as they are unaware of the banking formalities. A few of them who avail loan facility from banks fails to repay the same, resulting in poor loan repayment culture. Credit history information of rural entrepreneurs is not available and not operative in rural branches because of high transaction costs and this has to be developed. The self-help group scheme of microfinance has taken a new shape a found to be more successful and the key point to deliver as opposed to a top-down approach. Microfinance is a financial service of small quantity provided by financial institutions to the poor. These financial services may include savings, credit, insurance, leasing, money transfer, equity transaction, etc, i.e., any type of financial service, provided to customers for meeting their normal financial needs, lifecycle, economic opportunity and emergency with the only qualification that transaction value is small and customers are poor. Micro credits become distinct from other regular credits where not only credit amount is small and the clientele is poor, but also a credit is provided with 'collateral substitute' instead of traditional collateral and non-financial services for increasing the productivity of credit. SHGs mean small, economically homogenous and affinity groups of rural/urban poor, voluntarily formed to save and contribute to a common fund to be lent to its members as per group decision and for working together for social and economic uplift of their families and community.

China represents a unique example of rural entrepreneurial development with prima facie importance to the use of local resources, such as natural resources, human resources and material resources for local economic, social and cultural development and for running within the local area the surpluses so generated and at the same time effectively integrating rural development with modernization the urban sector. China's successful rural development through a less dogmatic and down-to-earth approach to rural industrialization is worth emulating for our country and the state of Assam at this crucial moment where the Covid pandemic has changed the lifestyle of people of the whole world. Thus taking a cue from Tagore, it is high time that the entrepreneurial ability of an average Indian villager needs to be harnessed with right earnest which may lead to the much sought-after de-bureaucratization of the development perspective in today's village India.