Micro Enterprises

Kudumbashree views Micro Enterprise Development as an opportunity for providing gainful employment to the people below poverty line and thereby improving their income and living standard. During early 70's growth of Micro Enterprise has resulted largely from the lack of alternative employment opportunity but now micro enterprise is considered as a growth engine that triggers developmental process. Micro enterprises need to be supported by better access to institutional finance through rural banking. This is not an automatic process. A futuristic strategy is to be worked out for increasing flow of funds and also for ensuring market for their products.

Two components of SJSRY (Swarna Jayanthi Shahari Rozgar Yojana) namely USEP (Urban Self Employment Programme) and DWCUA (Development of Women and Children in Urban Areas) provide opportunity to think of an alternative strategy to reach out the poor and achieve financial sustainability. For 'extending the poverty sustainability frontier', more efforts are to be taken and hence sharing of thoughts, ideas, and exposure to success stories and best practices will help in a big way. Kudumbashree through this Web site "SJSRY-Kudumbashree" hope that this aim can be achieved at least to a limited extent.

In the context of Urban Poverty, we define micro enterprises based on the following criteria:

1. Investment ranging from Rs 5,000 to Rs 2.5 lakhs

2. Enterprise should have a potential to generate at least Rs 1,500 per member per month either by way of wage or profit or both together.

3. Enterprise fully owned, managed and operated by members themselves, preferably, women below poverty line families as entrepreneurs..

4. A minimum turn over of Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakhs. (ie 2-10 times of the capital investment).

Through the operation of micro enterprise, we expect that the asset management capability of the poor people will increase along with their profit margin and income. The major areas of intervention proposed are:

1. Identification of innovative and creative activities suited to the specific environment in which the poor people are living, which try to solve the problem faced by the community and also by using the technological know how already available. The DWCUA Information Technology activity is identified in this background. This sunrise sector is being effectively used for solving a problem of creation of uptodate data base. Information provides the back bone of governance so IT units could catch up more and more opportunities from the society and to earn better income to the poor members belonging to BPL families.

2. In the absence of entrepreneurial traits, continued support by means of 'hand holding' and 'escort services' are required for ensuring sustainability of micro enterprises. Kudumbashree tries to learn much from the experiences of others and share what we could.

3. Training in the functional areas of management like production, inventory, finance, marketing, personal and project are to be imparted to the selected entrepreneurs With this objective we have conducted a series of training programmes and also developed a specific module for training potential Micro Entrepreneurs.

4. Kudumbashree plans to utilise the existing potential of resource persons available in and around the State for prompting entrepreneurship. The concept of Rural Consultancy was tried out at Malappuram for testing this idea.

5. Experimenting the possibility of networking of Micro Enterprises which in future may help to provide the original concept of syndication.

6. Identifying entrepreneurial activities that will help to solve a common problem.

7. Micro enterprise can be utilised as an opportunity for reviving the local food traditions prevalent in the State.

8. Micro enterprise development as a means for empowering women, especially economic empowerment.

Kudumbashree views micro enterprise development as an emerging process which will start with low capital low risk and low profit at the initial stage which will gain momentum and later switch on to low to medium capital and then to low to medium risk. In an advanced stage it may even reach medium capital medium risk and medium profit with appropriate technology, emerging technology or even with low technology.

For example catering units work with low capital, low risk, low profit and low technology where as an IT unit works with low to medium capital, low risk, low to medium profit and by using emerging technology. When we analyse the various DWCUA Units we can see a slow process of development of the Micro Enterprise through these stages. But when we start with individual enterprise the sudden jump from one stage to the next higher stage is not easily possible. Group activity provides synergy for growth. Hence they can grow from one level to next higher level even by cutting across the ladder. Ploughing back of capital is also possible which helps to improve the capital requirement without any additional burden of interest. As the exposure increases the chance of gaining confidence also improves. At this stage when more capital is employed it may help the person to use it in a better manner. Collective wisdom seldom fails; collective sharing of responsibilities yields rich dividends!

We solicit opinion of experts, academicians, entrepreneurs and activities who are engaged in similar activities across the globe, so that, this concept could be modified updated or even suitably changed.