Entrepreneurship at the Grass root level

Mahatma Gandhi ji had given a guiding message some 50-60 years back for the development of our great country. Lets go to villages and develop them. When I look at this message again, I admire the the great vision the man had!

If you look at the current situation in India, we have 4 biggest metros, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkatta and Chennai. Pune, Hydrabad, Bangalaru, Ahmadabad and few more follow the suite of the second layer of big cities in India. If you observe, the first thing you can notice about these metros is its crowdedness. There is rush, big Qs for any thing and everywhere, rubber-necking traffic jams, life threatening accidents, all kinds of sound, air pollution, sky high prices of per Sq. feet of land, scarcity of basic human needs, mammoth population which creates tons of garbage!!..

Now, if we just turn a back and take a look at all these problems in urban areas created by population, you can easily make out, these are all outcomes of dense development in city areas. These big towns are no doubt the land of opportunities for earning bread and butter, but how much pressure these lands can handle. There is always a limit to the natural resources which are available in and around these cities as well, which are day in, day out excruciated to satisfy the needs of metros. The respective local governing body with their operational capability tries to fulfill the city needs,however after a certain extent the system begins to collapse. Then based on the available option, the government body search for short term solution on the overused resources such as power cuts, limited supply of water, one ways on heavy traffic roads etc.

Now why this happens? why people run to these places, are they happy travelling every day in jam packed local trains, Hrs of waiting in traffic, thousand people running behind a single job, irregular water supply , huge power cuts, do they like it? No, not at all. But even though people know the problems, they still run to big metros,why? If we try to nail down the reason behind this rush, the root cause is unemployment, limited or no earning opportunities for a good living at the place where the people belong to.

NO body likes to be grinded in metros, but when a people don't have much option for the source of income in their living place, quite logically they tend to look for the avenues which will offer them something which can bring in the buck, prosperity, something which will give them the economical independence that they aspire for. This results in shifting of huge crowd in cities looking for opportunity and eventually the over crowdedness, creating bottlenecks in metros. This constitute significant unbalance between rural and urban development as well.

In the middest of all the big towns are facing this big problem, what can be the probable solution for it? Analytically speaking, the straight solution would be to pay attention to rural development, which I believe have been put forward millions times before in various forums and people in power take various actions to accomplish rural betterment but we still have remarkable imbalance.

I think the solution would be- if we can make rural area to operate independently and intra dependently(mutually helping out each other) village and cities need, we are on the way of solving this complex problem.

One of the way of brining this to reality is through throwing more focus on entrepreneurship at the grass root level. This will boost the economy at the basis level. If employment is generated in the rural area, people have enough opportunities and can have their earnings that satisfies their daily needs as well as make a good living, then how many people would want to leave their comfort zone and to travel to other cities/ metros?

Few steps have already been taken by the government already in this direction, e.g. creation of institutes which will inculcate business abilities, supporting the new ventures financially, but more often we see these policies fail to reach out to the intended beneficiary places. On the other hand, most times, the common man is missing the right set of education and skill set, start up capital investment, lack of awareness, dependency on external conditions such as the whether. So in a nutshell most of the times is a disconnect between the supplier(government body) and the beneficiary.

So how to address this one? How to fine tune the the entrepreneurship habit in small towns and villages?

We have a massive youth empowered with variety of set of education, however due to the unbalanced development problem cited above, youth prefers his metro life, struggle to get a job amidst the crowd, and once he gets it, then adjust himself into the job routine and even though at times don't like their job routine, continue doing it.

Instead of that, If we, as youth educated youth, are open to take the challenge and offer willingness to utilize our potential to maximum by working on creating a condusive environment for establishing entrepreneurship at these various rural levels, then, we have a massive growth potential to unfold. If the educated people with the knowledge and huge I&T processing power focus on the aspect of building grass root entrepreneurship by working on options such as-

1) to guide the people from the rural background financially

2) to create awareness among the people about the business and the advantages of it

3) to provide assitance and advice to the existing business for future growth

4) to help in a startup business, as there are lot things which people are not aware of

5) to start something of our own at the grass root level

It all depends on how our city youth thinks, depends on their priority in life, how much time they are willing to spare. However if we, the young blood can proactively start contributing heavily, it would drastically improve the way our small villages, towns, cities operates, which still compromises of around 60% of the total population.

Our country has been blessed with lot of natural resource, variety of soil, weather condition, spread across, especially untapped in the rural areas. We need to explore appropriate use of this natural wealth from every part of the country, and blend educated youth to thrust the entrepreneurship in rural areas, it will bring in our larger proportion of our population in mainstream development subsequently towards dream path of balanced systematic development across the country.

One striking example is Anand in Gujart, it was a typical undeveloped village, but visionary leader Dr. Vargis Couriun who had came back from his high education US degree, created a large conglomerate Amul known popularly as milk/white revolution. Lijjat papad was a small business which started in-door with bear minimum inputs, now it has generated employment for more than 40,000 house hold ladies from the small outskirts. There are lots of similar inspiring examples, the point is not to get overwhelmed by the big examples but to understand ones area of strength, and take a positive step forward for building entrepreneurship at the grass root level to the best of our abilities. These small steps of proportionate growth will act as a propellant force in our country's pathway towards being self sustained, successful, developed nation!! Don't you think so??