India’s Rural Entrepreneurs Opportunities & Challenges – An Overview
Abstract
India’s most unique proficiencies and challenges beneficial by the Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) makes us distinguish in the emerging world market. Rural Entrepreneurship is an important opportunity for those who like to migrate from non-urban to urban locality. Contrariwise, the fact is that most rural businesspersons facing a lot of lags due to the lack of support & services in a rural environment especially developing countries. Illiteracy, economic crisis, inadequate skills, and intangible skills are too risks and challenges for entrepreneurs to promote jobs or businesses in the rural sector. This article tries to identify all issues related to rural developers act as an eye-opener for identifying challenges, benefits, and opportunities for establishing small industries/companies on the rural side. The other objective is too focused on the key issues faced by non-urban entrepreneurs, mainly in the areas of product commercialization, financial services, electricity, water, transportation, and power needs.
Keywords: entrepreneurship, business, rural, economy, agriculture, challenges.
- Introduction
Entrepreneurship has a long past and the word ‘Entrepreneur’ originated in the French language in the middle of the 17th or 18th centuries. The term “Entrepreneurship” describes individual economic sources in the late 19th century. In the past two decades, the word entrepreneurship is widely termed popularly throughout the world by the public to corporate stakeholders. An interesting and essential scenario is that women entrepreneurs' participation in the global market is more compared to men nowadays (Renzulli eta1., 2000). Rural entrepreneurship is mostly defined as the formation of a fresh business institute that supports to make a new product, services, trending market, and adopting new technology in a countryside environment. Among the world population, nearly 575 million people are engaged in agriculture-related services whereas 52% of non-water land is harvested as contrary to 11% in the biosphere. India has a rising of 9.2 % (2015) service sector compared to the world with the lowest contribution serviced employment 28 % (2014) and aids around 66 % to the Indian GDP[1,2].
The primary sector of our world & Indian economy is the Allied Service sector, Raw Materials, Unorganized, and Agriculture. The next and versatile sectors are production, trade, fabrication, assembly, construction, etc. to expedite all operations. Finally, the tertiary sector provides infrastructural support such as the service sector, distributed, organized, banking, and Insurance [2] to the above sectors are shown in Figure 1.
- At Farm Level – improve the production of agricultural products by adopting technology, tools, components, and resources required for effective results.
- Service Providers – using smart infrastructure and transportation to increase productivity and profitability.
- Input Producers – Using third-party service providers to have high yield and products.
- Value Chain/Processing/Marketing - Small Scale nature farmed units, pre & post-harvest.
Figure 1: India’s Economy Sectors and Services
1.1 Advantages of Rural Entrepreneurship
- Provide employment openings
- Check on the migration of rural population
- Balanced regional growth
- Promotion of artistic activities
- Check on social evils
- Awaken the rural youth
- Improved standard of living
- Challenges involved in Rural Entrepreneurship
Some of the major difficulties faced by rural entrepreneurs include a low level of purchasing power of rural consumers so sales volume is insufficient, reduced profits due to competition, lack of financial assistance, and power failure are shown in Figure 2. Let us discuss in detail about challenges faced by rural entrepreneurs or small scale businessmen are follows [1,3]:
- Family Challenges: One of the Most and critical challenges faced by business seekers and promoters are convincing the family. The first question that arises is – Do you have a business idea or any thoughts on making money from a business.
- Social Challenges: Family challenges are usually the top most challenges but most of the time faced in the external environment is also social challenges major factors in entrepreneurs mind [4].
- Technological Challenges: Educational strategies mostly inspiring graduates technology-wise and gaps too much from the Job industry with online entrepreneurship.
- Financial Challenges: Financial challenges is not only for entrepreneurs also for any type of business holders, private or public sector are too and it is a huge issue in India [4].
Policy Challenges: All period is a lot of changes involved in policies to change in the government or non-government sectors.
Figure 2: Entrepreneurs Challenges in India
The following are the summary of challenges or issues encountered by any rural entrepreneurs:
- Execution of restrictions and guidelines
- Task Universalisation
- Elimination of process tailbacks
- Sensitization of implementing officers in field/front officers
- Lack of incubation system for entrepreneurship
- Threat alleviation or start-ups
- Opportunities for non-urban Entrepreneurship
- Support & Inspiration to native people: Rural area people always motivate and support entrepreneurs to enrich their business to improve socio-economic status as balanced among rural and urban people [5].
- Low establishment cost: Rural business people always planned with less budget and wastage to the urban areas.
- Competitive advantages: The majority of rural people are involved in agro-related work, but less income and recognition of the society they migrated as unskilled and semiskilled labour.
- Government policies and subsidies: Indian Government is continuously involved in the development of sustainable policies and principles to meet the world markets by providing less interest rate loans and subsidy.
- Availability of raw materials: Raw Materials are major essential and issue items in any production. Due to market risk and supply chain management, the availability of resources on-time is hectic to no transportation cost and flotation cost.
- Cost of production: Rural entrepreneur's cost of production is very low when compared to the urban industries. The factors of production are available at low cost, automatically the cost of production is also low. Because of this rural entrepreneurs can sell their goods and services at a cheaper cost[6].
- Optimum utilization of produces: Optimum utilization of farm produces is only possible through rural entrepreneurship. Most of the rural entrepreneurs depend upon the farm produces as raw materials.
- Employment generation for rural youth: Rural entrepreneurs are providing a hundred percent of jobs for rural youth. If the rural entrepreneurs are succeeding in this activity the migration of the people to urban from rural will be immediately stopped to a maximum extent.
- Promotion cost: There is no promotion cost for rural entrepreneurs; the competition is very less. Particularly there is no need for advertising and other promotional activities for their products.
- Potential customer: In this 21st century rural villagers are economically strong and also heavily populated. This heavy population can be converted into potential customers. That is the reason all the MNC’s are concentrated in rural villages for their potential [5, 6].
- Building the goodwill: Rural entrepreneurs have a lot of scope for building goodwill. Most of the rural entrepreneurs have ethical values and also these people do not work for pure profits.
- Suggestions
- The government of India or any developing country should create autonomous bodies like Election Commission for rural business people funding agencies.
- These autonomous funding agencies should have strong infrastructure among the ruling government in central or state with the proper public relations.
- State & Central Government must initiate more awareness and special training programs like MSME throughout the calendar.
- Rural entrepreneur’s always engaged with the latest trends and technologies via television, mobile, or internet to upgrades their needs and progress with local as well as global requirements.
- Conclusion
The rural entrepreneur is a key aspect for any under developing to developed countries as per the latest economic figure. Rural entrepreneurship is one the best tool used by any NGO’s and GO’s for the conversion of developing to developed level. Non-urban grew up in socio-economic is the solutions for recovering poverty of any countries. Hence any individual or citizens of India must buy/sell any Indian products. Therefore, there should be less stress on the integration of rural as well as the development of the economic status of each stakeholder. The most hectic issues are the participation of youth and curriculum in an institution should mould the students/faculty to speak about the importance of running a business rather than an employee of any organization. On the Government side, more quality support like schema definition, standardization, Quality Assurance (QA), financial agencies, NGOs, Media, and awards will make more contribution of youth in the business environment.
Reference
- Jayadatta S, Major Challenges and Problems of Rural Entrepreneurship in India, IOSR Journal of Business and Management (IOSR-JBM) e-ISSN: 2278-487X, p-ISSN: 2319-7668. Volume 19, Issue 9. Ver. II. (September. 2017), PP 35-44.
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- Nick Bertram etal, Modular construction: From projects to products, Capital Projects & Infrastructure, July 2019.
- Sandeep Saxena, Problems Faced By Rural Entrepreneurs and Remedies to Solve It, IOSR Journal of Business and Management (IOSRJBM) ISSN: 2278-487X Volume 3, Issue 1 (July-Aug. 2012), PP 23-29.
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