Three small but effective ideas to help small businesses

livemint.com:

The youth should aspire to be job givers, not just job seekers. Who gave this clarion call? Most would guess that it was our Prime Minister, during his electoral campaign of 2014. But it was not just him.

This mantra has been chanted by leaders across the political spectrum repeatedly over the years, and has now become a national slogan. The President of India echoed it, so did the Chief Minister of Punjab. The Swadeshi Jagran Manch swears by it.

Business schools sell this message to their management graduates. But how to succeed as a job giver, i.e., an entrepreneur? Unfortunately, only one in 10 entrepreneurs succeeds. This ratio is still better than chances of landing a formal sector job.

Hence, the slogan makes sense in a country where barely 10% of the workforce is in the organized sector. Only a fraction of India’s workforce has contractual rights like social security, pension or health benefits. For the rest, it is casual work, uncertain livelihoods and temporary jobs.

Also, you can’t sugar-coat this precarity by calling it the exciting gig economy. Joblessness among the youth is a global problem, aggravated by disruptive threats of automation and artificial intelligence. So, the youth are encouraged to become innovators and startup heroes.

What does the ‘job givers’ landscape look like? India has an estimated 64 million micro, small or medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), which is where jobs are being created. Add to these even-smaller nano enterprises, of which there may be another 30 million that are neither registered nor counted. They may be vegetable sellers accepting UPI digital payments, but they are otherwise completely informal.