A look at the title of our blog may make you wonder if I am re-reading Orwell's "1984", one of my most favourite novels. Well, no, it is not one of the maxims of the Ministry of Truth! Rather, it is a motto to celebrate the MSME'S as it is the MSME day according to the status shared by my colleague, Gokhale Madam.
The MSME stands for "Micro Small Medium Enterprises". It would not be wrong at all to maintain that they drive the economy of a city, nay, a country. Want proof? Visit Dharavi as it is currently, that is, in its pre-Adani phase. As I once proved to one of my BEC students, who was complaining about the lack of an alternative business model, Dharavi, the fallow yet fertile field of MSME's, can provide informal yet brilliant examples of business making that can easily be adopted by the West and its academia.
Remember the Mumbai Dabbewala's whom the then Prince Charles found so proficient a business model that he invited their representatives to his wedding? That is the power of the MSME for you.
Their entrepreneurial skills, mostly learned on the job, consist of service industries as diverse as catering to caregiving, from eateries to agri industry, to give a few examples. They form the bedrock of the production process of the giant companies. Want proof? Visit Pimpri-Chinchwad to understand how TATA Motors, for instance, is supported by the MSME's.
Yet, any large scale calamity, like the COVID years, can so break the MSME's that they are still not completely out of the woods. Sure, the GOI has tried to remove stumbling blocks such as the permits and the bank loans, et al. Yet if India is to be truly self-reliant, the MSME's, who would be the silent but strong partners in the production process, need a better support system.
May be, academic institutes can adopt certain MSME clusters, different ones every three years, and train them with business acumen, with linguistic finesse, with accountancy models and computer skills such as the Tally. The students, too, would thus get real life experience of the theory they otherwise learn bookishly. Thus emerge win-win solutions, right?
Such collaborations can be structured yet informal, and all would benefit big. Let me give you an example I tried in a small way. Some of my enthusiastic Additional English and BEC students agreed with me to teach English to the college canteen workers. Those days, these hands were young boys from the Maharashtra-Karnataka border, almost the same age as the students, even younger. We tried it for two months or so. Then began the May vacations, after which there was a new canteen management! Yet for these few days, I and my students realised that small is indeed big!
Pratima@ How would the AI affect the MSME's, especially its service industry arm, needs to be explored urgently and in a big way. Hope the academia has started exploring models to find MSME-friendly solutions.
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