Towards Sustainability of Entrepreneurship among Rural Women through Gender Responsive Institutional Support Services

Abstract

How far banking sector's claim of empowering millions of women of below poverty line with micro credits and micro enterprises is factual? It is a fact that Indian rural women cannot be made entrepreneurs overnight. Majority of the members of women SHGs are reported utilising micro credit, in the place of loans which they used to borrow from local moneylenders for meeting family needs of non-productive nature. A very low percentage of women SHGs only could initiate productive activities of sustainable nature with the micro credit. Majority of them are without access and control of production and managerial resources such as land, capital, credit, time, skill, knowledge, information, technologies, market and institutional inclusion or leadership. Discriminations of socio-economic and gendered nature had continuously kept them in the low ladders of economic activities. It is against these odds of disempowerment which the individual women face that, the group processes of SHGs are expected to empower them with entrepreneurship. For this to happen, locally adapted specific efforts of group for strengthening institutional support -services through technological and managerial capacity development and production and marketing infrastructure support are to be effected among rural women. Proven models of successful institutional support towards promotion of sustainable entrepreneurship among rural women groups - Women in Agriculture Programme of the Ministry of Agriculture, Kudumbashree programme of Government of Kerala, Bio-park of Chennai, Technology Incubator of AWAKE, etc. are worth analysing and emulating.