Encouraging Micro Entrepreneurship in Rural Bengal

At a young age, we learned that we have five demarcated senses and we are lucky if each one is intact – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. From the moment I begin my journey to our rural centers, I am sure my five senses are engaged and at work.

My project at Anudip Foundation for Social Welfare is to help develop its Entrepreneurship Development Program (EDP). Anudip’s mission is to create livelihood opportunities for low-income rural communities by training them in the “new economies” and helping them get jobs. Shying away from traditional livelihoods such as farming and handicrafts, Anudip’s beneficiaries are learning business and computers skills. Anudip’s goal is to show that rural communities can and should participate in India’s techno-savvy and computer-dependent industries. So many urbanites have reaped the benefits having been trained in computers that Anudip hopes to transfer this to the large human capital sitting, ready and able to work in rural Bengal.

Each day, we attempt to answer how we can prevent rural communities from migrating from their rural landscapes to the big city in order to seek employment. What alternative jobs and sectors can Anudip graduates be a part of while remaining in their local environment? Anudip’s response is encouraging skilled-based micro-entrepreneurship. Our Entrepreneurship Development Program works like this - we provide first-rate, Microsoft certified courses (Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Tally, etc) to people of all ages who have never seen a computer prior to our courses. As students graduate, some become inspired and interested in using these skills to run self-employed, group-based businesses (Cyber Cafés, Desktop Publishing businesses, Financial Accounting businesses, etc). Once they apply to our program, they are responsible for securing a fit location for their business and then we provide a zero-interest rate equipment loan (computers, digital cameras, printers, scanners, copy machines). They are required to pay this back in predetermined installments after year one. Along with the loan comes mentorship, strategy sessions, hand-holding and ultimately a 24-hour Anudip helpline given they run into any problems along the way.

As an example, we are currently helping three young girls living in a Muslim slum who, with our guidance, are starting a Computer Coaching Center for young kids in their area. This is a monumental conception in their slum as women and business rarely go together. Not only will their business provide them better livelihood options, they are serving as role models in their community and are becoming independent, self sufficient women. In addition, there are no computer-based businesses within 10 kilometers so their skills are specialized and desirable. Rural dwellers travel hours to Calcutta to take a passport photo, print a wedding card invitation or book an online train reservation. There is a “demand” for IT-enabled businesses in the rural and semi-urban areas of West Bengal and Anudip has the “supply” to feed this need. We are enabling rural villages to get access to information via a commonly used agent – the computer.

My responsibility is to create a process around identifying entrepreneurs that graduate from our program, help cultivate their ideas and mentor them along the way. They need assurance that they have emotional support as starting a new venture can be quite risky. Anudip graduates look for help with developing business plans, pricing and marketing their services, and most of all building personal confidence. Dibyendu, my partner at Anudip on EDP, and I spend our days strategizing and then testing our ideas in the field. We find that most of our entrepreneurs live in rural villages with limited accessibility to common modern resources. They, however, are not yearning for the urban lifestyle. They are in search of improved livelihoods in their own natural environments.

The Current State of My Five Senses

Seeing: My journey from Calcutta to the rural villages is a contemplative time for me. Whether we’re in a car, train, bus or auto-rickshaw, I make sure to get a window seat. One headphone in and one out to drain out the background noise, I stare out at the changing landscape. Within an hour, the environment goes from large cars, tall buildings and crowded streets to bicycles, mud homes and green rice paddies. The drive from the city to the village reminds me of why my work is so important. The context rural communities come from is drastically different from their city friends yet they want the same opportunities to provide for their families as city dwellers do. Side note: the number of colorful sunsets I have seen on my trips back into the city is beyond lucky.

Hearing: I love going to the field and speaking a combination of broken Punjabi/Hindi to local Bengalis. I think they appreciate my efforts. I'm getting quite skilled at gesturing, laughing and smiling to get my point across. It is most important that I am a good listener because as I ask a lot of questions, I have to pay attention to context clues given the language barrier. When all else fails, I say “khub bhalo” (“very good”) and then ask Dibyendu for a detailed translation on our ride home.

Smelling: I have asthma, allergies and other respiratory problems which Calcutta likes to agitate. I also have a sincerely receptive sense of smell which make Calcutta’s aroma of smoke, gas and urine particularly apparent. If anyone knows of a competition or game show where smell is tested, please let me know. I’d dominate and share my winnings. Anyway, spending afternoons outside in less congested areas is a gift to my lungs. I am so content working outside surrounded by trees, leaves and simplistic beauty.

Tasting: This experience is beginning to tickle my taste buds of how business development and encouraging entrepreneurship is important to the development of rural India. I am finding myself an interesting crossroad - entrepreneurship and social business. India is so massive that it needs the brunt of large scale projects and social businesses to capture the largest populations living in the rural areas. I like the taste of this so far and hope I can contribute my own flavor to this field.

Touching: We spend about two days a week in our suburban office in Salt Lake and the other three days at our field centers. In the office, we create workshops, manuals and questionnaires which serve a s templates for the remainder of the week. We then talk to prospective entrepreneurs, find out what they need and react from there. Given how grassroots my project is (working one-on-one with entrepreneurs), some may say the project is not scalable. However, I believe the handful of rural villagers we are touching sides with “quality” in the aged-old debate of quality versus quantity. For this reason, I am confident we can make a marginal, yet meaningful impact.

Posted by Jessica Sawhney