Identifying the Barriers and Drivers to Agriculture Entrepreneurship in India

Introduction

Agriculture and its allied sectors is a crucial sector because it has significant role in poverty reduction, employment generation, availability of food supply and income. This sector faces many challenges, including access to credit, insurance coverage for harvest and post-harvest losses, irrigation facilities, etc. are need to be addressed. Entrepreneurship not only includes the creation of new ventures or start-ups but includes innovation and growth also (Gartner, 1990). Agri-entrepreneurship needs to address the issue of lower farm mechanisation, low productivity of the livestock sector so that it can be helpful for farmers in general and agri-entrepreneur in particular. Though the food processing sector and livestock sector are rising at the rate of five per cent and 8 percent, respectively, more actions are needed to check wastages and create better marketing of the products. Agriculture incorporates agricultural activities, including the growing up of crops, horticulture, animal husbandry and dairying. Entrepreneurship is a kind of change consisting of 3 parts, i.e., recognizing, assessing and exploiting opportunity, a new setup that can be managed by facilitating producing and selling new goods or services and through value creation.

The share of the primary sector in India's total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has declined due to the relatively high growth in the manufacturing and service sectors. This is a transitional result of the development process of any country because of the faster growth of non-agricultural sectors. In Table 1, it is indicated that the share of GDP of the agriculture sector in the GDP of the Indian economy is continuously decreasing with the fact that the share of other sectors of the economy is constantly increasing as India is moving from an agrarian economy to service economy.