Rural Entrepreneurship: A Pragmatic Approach for Socio-Economic Upliftment of Women in Assam

Abstract

Rural entrepreneurship plays a vital role in the economic development of a country. Rural entrepreneurship means, which ensure value addition to rural resources in rural areas engaging largely rural human resources. Rural entrepreneurship means not only set up enterprises in rural areas but also using rural produces as raw material and employing rural people in their production processes. Thus the rural entrepreneurship is vital for rural economic development. The rural entrepreneurs play important role in driving local and national economies. The structure of rural economies is essentially composed of small enterprise, which is responsible for most of the job growth and innovation for the local economy. Empowering women has emerged as an important issue in recent times. The economic empowerment of women is a vital element of strong economic growth in a country. Rural entrepreneurship happens to be one of the best ways towards self-sufficiency and poverty alleviation for women in a country where employment is not guaranteed. Involvement of women in entrepreneurial activities would ensure effective utilization of labour, generation of income and hence improvement in quality of life. Economic empowerment of women by entrepreneurial activities led to the empowerment of women in many things such as socio-economic opportunity, property rights, political representation, social equality, personal right, family development, community development and at last the nation development. In the present age of globalization where each and every economy of the world is giving emphasis on women empowerment which is not possible by creating employment opportunities for them but to motivate them to go for creating their own enterprise. Therefore, entrepreneurial development among women can be considered a possible approach to economic empowerment of women. Thus, the development of rural entrepreneurship is considered to be a panacea for harnessing vast untapped human resources. That is why, this study is mainly done on Assam, because in spite of lot of potentiality of rural industrialization in Assam, the pace of industrialization in the state is slow.The potentiality for development of rural entrepreneurship among women in Assam is very high because Assamese women are habituated to do various types of traditional activities like weaving, knitting, embroidery, readymade garments ,jam,jelly,pickle making etc.Thus, there is a great scope of Assam through such type of activity promote the rural entrepreneurship and increased the employment opportunities in the rural areas. Therefore, the objective of our paper is to find out the prospect of rural entrepreneurial activity as well as find out the problem cum suggestion for empowerment of women in Assam through rural entrepreneurship.