The Rise of Women Entrepreneurs in India

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India has been hailed as one of the fastest growing start-up ecosystem in the world, with 11% of adult population being directly engaged in early stage entrepreneurship.

The share of women entrepreneurs in the modern start-up ecosystem is also steadily rising. According to Sixth Economic Census released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, women constitute around 14% of the total entrepreneurship i.e. 8.05 million out of the total 58.5 million entrepreneurs in India.

What does this mean?

Changing trends in the corporate, social and higher education sector are further enabling women to take a leap and realize their entrepreneurial potential.  These include:

• Opportunity
• Education
• Financial freedom
• Access to mentorship
• Social dynamics
• Way forward

Check out more here.

Deciding Against a Life-Sentence of Selling Soap

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The Economist offers "the outlook for entrepreneurs in India."  And yes - we are all looking for the next Infosys.  One particular comment in the article stood out for me:

And yet, for all these barriers, new firms are emerging in unexpected places. Vinayak Chatterjee, who graduated from IIMA in 1981, first joined a consumer-goods firm. After deciding against a life-sentence of selling soap, he went on to establish Feedback Infra, an engineering and consulting firm in Delhi that specialises in infrastructure projects. With 1,250-odd staff, half of them engineers, and a list of blue-chip and government clients, it exemplifies the kind of high-end services that India could excel at. Mr Chatterjee reckons his costs are a quarter of rich-world firms’. Big parts of this business are “no different fundamentally from IT outsourcing”, he says. The priority for now, though, is to build scale at home. With about $50m of revenue, growing by about 30% a year, the firm is on its way to that goal. A flotation would be a natural next stage in a few years’ time.

Reminds me of the bold statement Steve Jobs once made to former Pepsi exec John Sculley when he tried (and succeeded) to woo Sculley to run Apple:  "... prefer to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?" (refer to 1983-1993).

So you can choose:  Become a global entrepreneur or sell soap in India for the rest of your life!

Read the entire article here.