Diary of a Rural Manager!

India’s most enduring heritage since independence is poverty. Poverty can't be fought by throwing doles and subsidy in the name of government schemes. It can only be done by creating suitable ecosystem for innovative and risk taking individuals. These persons need not to be engineering and management college students. A street vendor with no education is taking more risk and still pursing business is an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is more prevalent and still damn difficult to pursue for people working in unorganised sector. A NCEUS report estimates that in 2005 out of the 485 million persons employed in India, 86 percent or 395 million worked in the unorganised sector, generating 50.6 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product. Someone once told me to understand how businesses runs, interact with an entrepreneur, even if it is a pawn shop. I didn't get the point back then. Once in the college, I had read few chapters of book Grassroots entrepreneurship : entrepren...

While we have a fair idea of social network, only few know about this is relatively new and multifaceted jargon: Social Capital . The simplest way to understand social capital is through the old adage, “it’s not what you know, but who you know” . There is variety of definitions of this word due to highly contextual nature. In words of wiki social capital is the expected collective or economic benefits derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and groups. I became aware of this term while studying Livelihood and Natural resource management. I recalled concept of social capital while working with producer groups. I started wondering about cohesive nature and community cooperation. Any person in society cooperate as well as compete. Still others may be in conflict. Hence, I saw there is a scope for micro to macro level analysis of social capital. Alas ! I am not an expert on this subject. There is also an absence of consensus on how to measure it due...