Ethnic Entrepreneurs and Role of the Micro Enterprise in the Economy

Abstract

Micro enterprise an unorganised sector mainly controlled by poor and un-privileged people, but a vibrating sector where the future is, unfortunately not yet noticed properly, just because we don't want to understand the strength of this sector. The policy makers are more busy for large, medium, and small, but surprisingly and silently this neglected micro sector are providing more than 90% employment opportunity, among the poor, women and un privileged. Anybody can see not only in the metro cities, but even in small town, rows of roadside stall for anything and everything and different kind of service centre, auto repairing to peoples to weigh bridge. Besides there are millions of people are engaged in agro processing and support service for agriculture in rural India. In future there will be fewer opportunities for employment in large organisation or government department in the developed economies. The present trend of large sector downsizes the workforce, already many of them offering VRS to their employees. So the employment opportunities are coming down day by day, it may be one man organisation (Micro enterprise in real sense) that will operate their business from their home, will control the main part of the business .In Britain 67% of the registered business employed more than five people. In India we have to create this type of micro enterprise for real utilisation of our huge manpower and development. This group of entrepreneurs are not trained and not even properly educated; they have chosen this profession by social and economic pressure. But they are in present all sorts of business from manufacturing, trading and service, neither they have any link with the Government agency nor the Govt. is interested about them but surprisingly this unorganised sector are producing over 60% of India's domestic product. Till there are lack of well-defined policy •or scheme for the growth of this micro enterprise. So need of the hour to build the support system and link this sector with the mainstream of business. Because this sector co-exists in any given market system and co-exist as process link or ancillary. Therefore the strategy to promote this sector must be aligned to the general industrial/business growth strategy, may be globalisation thrust. The support system is not so vast for this group, they need little infrastructure and small financial support and can be set up anywhere. But if we can give proper technology support within their reach such as telecommunication and computer access as the use of technology support spreads many more will join. Even large number of women will participate in this sector through modern communication system, from their home. In this way more housewives will get involved to generate income for families.