The Seed Journey of Women Agri- Entrepreneurs Leading to Economic Empowerment

Abstract

Indian economy is an agrarian economy, shifting from agriculture to agribusiness is essential pathway to make agriculture as a sustainable tool for growth. Agri-entrepreneurship has a potential to contribute to the growth trajectory of Indian economy by contributing to rural employment, income generation, poverty reduction and improving the health & wealth of rural population. Due to the change in the socio-economic dimensions more number of women are taking up Agri-Entrepreneurship as an opportunity. Before it was man’s domain, but today most of the women are taking it up and creating wonders with new thoughts. The present study focuses on understanding and building the Agri-business opportunities in the rural areas and made a special focus on measuring the economic progress of women who are into Agri-entrepreneurship. The core idea of the paper is to suggest different stakeholders that if there exists a good agricultural-entrepreneurial ecosystem in place what would be the economic progress of the women. The nine factors which are loaded on rotated component matrix are economic enhancement (.718), small investment (.662), economic reason (.776), fulfilling long felt desire (.584), active participation and involvement in the group (.577), ability of decision making (.577), open to seek help (.559), behavioral & emotional intelligence to solve the problems (.558) and flexibility (.547). In the present study women are keen in taking up the responsibility of managing the money in their respective households (.903). There is a positive correlation between the economic reason to join the group by the women and the factors loaded indicating that women investing their time and energy in agri-entrepreneurship has a positive impact towards leading to economic empowerment in the larger perspective. The results show that there is a positive economic progress of women groups in all dimensions.