It's not just the well-off engineers and MBAs who are taking to setting up own businesses, but also the hard-pressed agriculture graduates. Though government jobs are their first choice, these are hard to come by and never in large numbers.
This was the case with 25-year-old Md Afroz of Miryalaguda in Nalgonda district. He says he tried hard for a government job after his B Sc in agriculture, trying his luck with several exams.
He had never thought of becoming an entrepreneur before, but changed his plans after going through a two-month training programme for budding entrepreneurs that he attended earlier this year to fill his gap period.
Afroz is now in the process of getting a bank loan to fund his farm machinery venture that requires an investment of Rs 20 lakh.
Others like T Yella Goud from Dubbaka in Medak district, who is also an agriculture graduate and already had plans to set up a dairy farm, consciously decide to go for the training. The two are part of 162 people from Andhra Pradesh who went through the training till date in 2011.
The training in question is part of a central government programme called Agri-clinics and Agri-Business Centres, devised as way to balance the available human resources with the required agricultural services.
According to P Chandrashekara, director, National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management (MANAGE), the course provides exposure to business management principles, possible areas for enterprises, ways of getting bank loans, as well as one-year hand-holding support after the venture is established. It helps with bank loans of up to Rs 20 lakh, with a subsidy in the range of 36-48 per cent.
As a nodal institute for the programme, MANAGE has trained 24,400 people since 2002 through 57 partner institutes across the country. Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu are the leading states in terms of the number of trainees.
However, he says the numbers trained is not the same as numbers converted to entrepreneurship. Out of 24,400 trained so far, around 9,500 have set up ventures in 32 categories ranging from agri inputs, advisory services, veterinary clinics, nurseries, magazines and CDs, food processing and tourism, among others.
“The programme helps by turning youngsters into job creators rather than seekers, with each agri-preneur estimated to provide jobs for six other people on average. It also helps by promoting a reverse migration of educated youth from urban to rural areas,” Chandrashekara tells Business Standard.
According to him, there are 48 agricultural universities in the country, producing 15,000 graduates a year and thousands of diploma holders. Though the public sector extension system provides 85 per cent of the current services, it cannot absorb such large numbers of job aspirants.
The agri-preneurs trained so far can cover 2.5 million farmers in 125,000 villages. According to an internal survey by MANAGE, their services are found to have led to a 17 per cent increase in yields and 28 per cent improvement in incomes.
“The ideal ratio of field-level extension workers to farmers would be reached when the number of agri-preneurs reaches the critical mass of 50,000,” Chandrashekara says.
He adds that the programme is at a take-off stage now, as the awareness grows among agri graduates and also indirectly through the first-generation agri-preneurs.
One such 'agri-preneur,' B Krishnamurthy, who started an artificial ripening system in Hyderabad, agrees. He says, "The programme is very useful. It helps us with getting bank loans and other things. The awareness about it will also grow, but it's another matter that we were not able to attend regularly because of other work."
