Sheatwork.com, a one-stop destination for women looking to become entrepreneurs, released a report on the State of Women Entrepreneurship in India. According to the report, Goa, Jammu & Kashmir, Karnataka, Rajasthan and West Bengal are the leading Indian states with schemes supporting women entrepreneurs.
The focus of these schemes across states mainly focuses on financial aid, followed by training and skill building. Among sectors, the most amount of women entrepreneurs enter the education sector followed by financial services, insurance, livestock forestry and lodging – according to reports.
Ruby Sinha, founder,sheatwork.com, said, “The United Nations defines “promotion of gender equality and women empowerment” as one of its Millennium Development Goals and the encouragement and support of women entrepreneurship can contribute to this in a big way.
The report released by Sheatwork.com also found that nearly 80% of women across the country are not depending on government schemes for financial aid and are self-financing their ventures. The group has cited lack of awareness about this schemes as the possibility for these results.
With a larger proportion in the SMBs, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal hold the most amount of women who are entrepreneurs. Higher literacy rates and general women empowerment in the regions could be part of the reason for these results. While the North-Eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Nagaland have a lower number of female entrepreneurs, the male to female ratio of entrepreneurs is very strongly in their favour.
“While efforts have been made by the central and state governments as well as independent agencies through the years in India, there still exists a huge gap in awareness and promotion levels of women entrepreneurship,” Sinha adds.
The objective of the report, according to Sinha, was to understand where women entrepreneurship in India stands. It was also to understand how the existing ecosystem and multiple schemes made available for women entrepreneurs can be utilised better and improved – if need be – to encourage more women to take the entrepreneurial plunge.
