How social enterprise is creating a vital, and necessary market in India.
In 2017 I was asked to draw on my knowledge and experience of working in the social innovation and impact investing space in India and contribute to the highly regarded Cuban not-for-profit and independent (of state or institution) publication, Temas.
The focus of this edition is "small scale for development"
"Appreciating the role of the small scale in the most advanced contemporary economies is key to the dilemmas of development. The neoliberal culture, which privileges the transnationals, relegates to small businesses the mission of occupying the displaced by rationalization, assuming the social services that the State abandons, and innovating in areas of high technology that previously reserved for large companies. By identifying planning with vertical management of conglomerates, laws of development with macroeconomic curves, small scale with timbiriches, state-centered socialism seems to bet on the large scale, growth and profitability, rather than the shared welfare and the human development index, thought by Amartya Sen, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Karl Polanyi, Vandana Shiva."
With this in mind, the Indian context provides a rich landscape to draw understanding of the role, and need of the MSME sector, for growth and well as socio-economic development.
Paper abstract:
The MSME sector has emerged as a dynamic part of the Indian economy in recent years. This emergence has come about with limited government legislation and incentives, poor access to finance and financial products and tough market conditions. Nonetheless, it does show that the potential to increase the sector’s contribution to the national GDP are there. This article analyses the situation, its impact and the challenges that India’s private sector and government must face in the future.
The publication and the Spanish translation is available at Temas. For the English original, please click here.
About Temas:
Temas is published, since January 1995, with the purpose of constituting a space for critical reflection and debate of ideas, around the problems of contemporary culture and social thought in Cuba and in the world. It covers the arts, the problems of social and humanistic sciences, political theory and ideology.
The journal gathers diverse positions and interpretations that can enrich the knowledge of the Cuban and world reality, from an integral and multidisciplinary perspective. It aims to stimulate discrepancy and exchange, and give space to the plurality of opinions of authors of any nationality.
The magazine is published four times a year. Up to the present, its financing has been provided mostly by the Fund for the Development of Culture and Education, agency of the Ministry of Culture of Cuba. Contributions have also been received from the Norwegian People's Aid (APN), Harvard University, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the Ford Foundation, OXFAM, UNESCO, the MacArthur Foundation and other institutions.
