Role of NGOs in Entrepreneurship Development: A Study of Dakshina Kannada District

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is an 'in' thing, which every country wants to promote. India is no exception. Since the sixties, India is in the forefront of entrepreneurship development initiatives and her expertise is being shared by many African and Southeast Asian countries. The credit for expanding the knowledge base goes to some premier State owned agencies - EDIT, NISIET, NlESBUD and others. In the initial years, the development of 'industrial entrepreneurship' received the prime focus. However, there was a paradigm shift to stimulate entrepreneurship among the non-conventional segments of the society when the self-employment and anti-poverty programmes were introduced, Entrepreneurship Development through training intervention, popularly called as Entrepreneurship Development Programmes (EDPs) conceived to harness the entrepreneurial talent among urban elite, was scaled down to meet the requirements the specified target groups. It was the developmental compulsions that forced tile changes in the conventional EDP methodology to use it as a self. Employment stimulator to train non-conventional and lesser known target groups -- youth (literate or illiterate), poor (urban or rural), women, and other disadvantaged sections of the society. Of late the NGOs (both national and international NGOs) are exploiting the entrepreneurial talent among the above target groups in a big way. The phenomenon - the entry of NGOs into entrepreneurship development arena - is not to be construed as a mere societal response to eliminate unemployment and poverty but it is a right step to create healthy civil society. Thus for many NGOs, entrepreneurship development is one of effective tools of human resource development to achieve wider socio-economic goals.