North shrinks on small offers

CHANDIGARH: The north likes it big: Lavish lifestyles, grand marriages, imposing businesses and huge appetites.

The small, it seems, is no longer as beautiful as it was a generation ago. Whether it is micro finance or mini-pack FMCG retail, small helpings have no takers.

“It’s the mindset,� observes a retailer who confesses to stocking less number of small packs as the demand needed to sustain the desired volumes is simply not there.

If officials handling personal care business of HLL are a puzzled lot owing to market’s response to smaller pack of Lux, Nabard officials too are unhappy. Nabard has been sweating it out with micro finance and its Rural Entrepreneurship Development Programme (REDP).

While money is flowing into the rural infrastructure development for the region, the entrepreneurship programmes that can create human resources and skill sets for the new system are simply not finding enough takers.

Going by the figures quoted in the annual Nabard report, of the total national activity to promote rural entrepreneurship, only about 2% takes place in Haryana and Punjab.

The fact that there are not many takers for ‘micro-entrepreneurship’ in the region famous for the large number of self employed has had many stumped.

The private companies that are trying to create an industrial human resource pool say that bottlenecks arise from unwillingness “to get trained.�

The Nabard programme that aims to “help educated unemployed rural youth in setting up small/micro-enterprises and thus creating sustainable employment opportunities in rural areas� has found few takers due to lack of sufficient numbers of NGOs and SHGs in the region, reason bank officials.

“Historically, such experiments have been much more successful where women have been involved. This area is little conservative about their women folk leading the way and so the ‘training experiments’ fail,� reasons another Chandigarh based industrialist.
Those who have gone the extra mile have found success as Mr Dhingra of Orient Craft who has had training centre in a village near Gurgaon and created a skill set in internationally accepted embroidery work.

The revamped strategy that involves involving technical agencies like NITCON, REEDS, NSIC, Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology might help Nabard take up the number of programmes up to 50 this financial year, they added.

Hope this works!