Background:

Entrepreneurship is a critical pathway for boosting economic participation: It offers opportunities for self-employment and job creation, while providing massive gains to the global economy. Research shows that of the out of people who could contribute more effectively to the global economy in 2022, 812 million will be living in developing countries. Supporting entrepreneurship, however, is a complex undertaking with multidimensional obstacles. Although evidence continues to accumulate regarding how best to support entrepreneurs in diverse contexts, a knowledge gap persists on how to apply these lessons till date the startups have been successful in e-commerce, and other IT based applications of service sector. The startups in manufacturing sector are yet to take off in a big way. The launch of the above-mentioned policy initiatives should give a boost to startups in manufacturing as well. As of 16th November 2015, 806 startups have taken off during the year and the main sources of funding were seed funding and private equity and the products were mainly IT based applications in the service sector.

India today has reached that stage of the demographic transition wherein more than 60 percent of the population is in the economically active age group of 15-59 years, commonly referred to as the DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND. For India to tap this dividend it is necessary that the economy is able to generate enough job opportunities to productively absorb this economically active population. We do keep mentioning of 500 million strong workforce by 2022 but India faces challenges in reaping this demographic dividend considering that illiteracy levels among the labour force is still high and between 70-80 percent of the labour force have education levels below secondary. Almost 48 percent of the workforce is engaged in agriculture while contribution of agriculture to GDP is not more than 16 percent. This situation may be attributed to the low level of education and thereby inability to access decent jobs in the non-farm sector. In terms of status of employment 52 percent of the workforce is self-employed as own-account workers or helpers, 30 percent as casual workers while only around 18 percent have regular jobs. This has resulted in more than 90 percent of the workforce engaged in informal jobs and slowing down the structural transition from farm to the non-farm sector. The policy focus in the labour market has therefore been to create decent jobs which can give the workforce a reasonable standard of living. While the emphasis has been on wage employment it has been felt essential to promote self-employment or to be specific entrepreneurship as an entrepreneur would be in a position to create more jobs.

Aim:

To empower budding and existing entrepreneurs who want to start, run and grow their business and to create conducive conditions for inclusive, resilient and sustainable economies.

Objective:

• To enable environment for growth-oriented entrepreneurs in Sustainability domain.
• To inculcate the spirit of entrepreneurship among aspiring and budding entrepreneurs.
• To facilitate various support services including information endeavouring to become entrepreneurs.
• To equip them with sufficient knowledge of various frameworks and tools required to create and implement a business plan efficiently.
• To enable funding opportunities to entrepreneurs by giving them a forum to showcase their Business Plan .