Bilal Ahmad Dar
There is a growing interest in the role that entrepreneurship can play as a catalyst to achieve economic and social development objectives, including growth, innovation, employment, and equity. Entrepreneurship can manifest within an economy in a number of ways, and it includes both formal and informal economic activities for the purposes of creating wealth. Entrepreneurship has been identified as one of the major trends shaping business, and even society. To promote entrepreneurship it is important that the people with innovative ideas and skills have access to the vital entrepreneurial resources like money, talent and know-how to initiate new business, especially small and medium size enterprises. One of the major objectives of the governments and its economic managers is to ensure full employment in the State or trying to ensure the creation of maximum job opportunities for the ever growing labour force.
In J&K the government employs only 9-8% of the labour force the only option available is to nudge economic activity in the private sector through encouraging entrepreneurship in regards to the establishment of small and medium size business and industry by making available necessary resources and technical know-how to the youth entering the labour market.
In the past, several initiatives were taken in the public sector to push small and medium size business in the form of loans to the youth but unfortunately they all failed to create the desired impact due to the rampant sleaze in the public organizations. The other reason for failure of those efforts was that the basic ingredients of entrepreneurship like the technical know-how and talent to start a business were totally neglected. There is no support available in the public sector for carrying out research and preparing feasibility reports in regards to different lines of business and industry.
Entrepreneur growth requires institutes prerequisite which underpin human transactions. Those prerequisite are those that human civilization has evolved over the many years. Economical aid is working only where the policies and institutional environment is good. This again lends support to the ‘primacy of institutional’ arguments. A society that gets the institutional set up goes on to achieve economic development. Entrepreneurship may be directed towards the accumulation of wealth through unproductive enterprise. The system of incentives that a country sets up in its governance mechanism can either promote healthy entrepreneurship leading to economic growth and prosperity. In State the policies have always been biased towards the high class. This is true of the economical policies which have been biased towards the high scale sector. Rather than entrepreneurship, policies are planned for investors and investments became the norm. Incentives were offered to attract investment. Such incentives included licensed monopolies in protected markets, cheap land and credit and subsidized inputs.
Promoting entrepreneurship has its own importance in Jammu and Kashmir lags in start-ups, with less than half the rate of early-stage entrepreneurial activity found in other factor-driven economies. Part of the problem is that most young people coming out of universities prefer searching for a job instead of exploring entrepreneurial career opportunities
Lack of peace and political stability has don most of the damage to the fabric of industrial development in the State particularly since 1990 when the conflict erupted in the state which had the most dampening effect on all spheres of life. The other serious impediments to the process of industrialization in the State have been the lack of requisite infrastructure in particular electric power and better road connectivity
The absence of an ambitious entrepreneurial class with outward looking approach is also affecting the growth of industries in the State. The educated youth are displaying little preference towards entrepreneurship and are heavily oriented towards white collar jobs. However, the State government is now making all out efforts to defeat this undesirable phenomenon. For this purpose government has established Entrepreneurship Development Institute and also seeking collaboration of different agencies of repute in the country to guide and help the state towards entrepreneurship development. But the outcome of all these and other initiatives would depend upon the serious and conscious efforts made to strengthen and improve the role performance of different organizations that have been created to promote industrial growth in the state.
CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS
Entrepreneurship is essential for rapid and sustained economic growth and development. It creates the required man power and skills necessary for accelerated growth, reduce unemployment and poverty. It is therefore strategic and wise for state to assign a significant and increasing role to entrepreneurship in their effort to revamp the economy. For the entrepreneurs to be effective in creating wealth and employment opportunities the government needs to create an investor-friendly environment encompassing stable macro-economic policies and address urgently the dilapidated infrastructural facilities in the state, the educational sector needs to be revamped with emphasis on science and technology. There is need to change the mind set of young people to embrace self employment rather than waiting for non-existing government job. Lastly, there is the need to ensure that those with innovative ideas are provided with the financial support to translate such ideas into reality.
(The author has Completed PhD Jaipur national university Jaipur, Department: school of business and management [email protected]. Views expressed by author are his own.)
