India for the first time moved into the top 100 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business global rankings. The recent surge in entrepreneurship in India is a clinching proof of its huge enterprising potential. However, there is still a lot of untapped potential among people especially youth. If harnessed properly, this potential can result in the creation of a lot of new businesses, some of which can transform themselves into large and well-established organsiations. A huge chunk of growth in entrepreneurship is coming from five industries namely health care, education, retailing, financial services, market research, and logistics. In each of these industries, entrepreneurs are exploiting opportunities in both business to business and business to consumer segments. To be more specific, a lot of start-ups are emerging in health technology, financial technology, online retail, education technology and analytics. However, the pace of creation of start-ups is low based on global standards. Despite showing promise to accelerate the growth of start-ups, India is saddled with problems like regional and sect oral disparity, inadequate support systems and wrong perception about business. We have a situation where some states are developing rapidly in terms of creation of start-ups whereas some Cities are lagging behind in terms of creation of start-ups. A large percentage of start-ups have been created in Delhi, Hyderabad Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkota.
Based on a joint Study conducted by report by NASSCOM and Zinnov across various states in India, Bangalore, Delhi/NCR and Mumbai have been found to be the key start-up hubs. Simply put, India is facing problems that fall in four categories namely psychological, human resources, infrastructural and monetary. While the infrastructural and monetary problems in India are slowly reducing, the psychological problem and human resource problem still persist and are strong deterrents to entrepreneurship. The monetary problem has been reduced to some extent with the availability of two major funding options namely venture capital and angel investment. However, these two funding options have largely catered to a few industries like information technology, bio technology, e-commerce, health care and mobile & telecom. The infrastructure problem has been reduced to some extent with the support system developed by the government. However, the problem is that infrastructural facilities have not been spread across uniformly in India. The psychological problem and human resource problem has to be tackled effectively so as to promote entrepreneurship.
The psychological problem and human resource problem are related to entrepreneurial propensity and entrepreneurial potential. To tackle the psychological problem, the first step to be taken is to create awareness about entrepreneurship.
The awareness should be such that it should dispel the myths and misconceptions about entrepreneurship, which obviously leads to a higher propensity in individuals to start and operate their own businesses. This in turn would make educated youth of the country to become job providers rather than job seekers. The human resources problem can be effectively tackled by strengthening the education and training programs in entrepreneurship. An action oriented education with a focus on developing a curriculum that helps students to develop entrepreneurial propensity and entrepreneurial potential will solve the human resources problem pertaining to entrepreneurship. The growth of entrepreneurship in India depends to a large extent on its ability to surmount its the four categories of problems namely psychological, human resources, infrastructural and monetary.
Dr. C.Venkata Ramana,
Associate Professor,
School of Business,
AURO University