DANTEWADA: India’s first Global Tribal Entrepreneurship Summit organised at Dantewada district in south Chhattisgarh Tuesday stressed on fueling entrepreneurial spirit among tribal community, generating livelihood opportunities, effective packaging-branding of products from tribal belts and help facilitate global outreach of locally made organic products.
The summit highlighted the nation's enabling environment for innovations and entrepreneurship -- including actions by the government to empower the tribals, increase the ease of doing business and supporting startups.
Various sessions deliberated on how the invaluable knowledge of tribals can help with innovative ideas to improve livelihood and mainstream development. The tribals who were cited to have huge potential to grow were seen as pioneers in making optimal use of natural resources.
“It’s high time we respect tribal wisdom and bring the tribals into mainstream development. Tribal entrepreneurship can’t be kept aloof and is important component of human entrepreneurship. We can understand how tribal women in particular contributed extensively in conserving biodiversity”, said eminent agriculture scientist M S Swaminathan in his address through video conferencing.
“Let’s develop a robust infrastructure to meet the requirements of the tribal community”, union minister of state for science and technology Y S Chowdhary said.
The chief minister Raman Singh hoped such summit help reduce the gap between global market and local entrepreneurs.
“Let’s provide tribal a platform to enable them to avail benefits of globalisation”, the CM said.
NITI Aayog chose Dantewada to host the first ever Tribal Entrepreneurship Summit with the objective to inspire, nurture and promote the spirit of entrepreneurship among tribals besides addressing the problems faced by the tribal community such poverty, malnutrition, low literacy and poor health.
The entrepreneurs from rural background shared their success stories and how Around 70 entrepreneurs from across the country and couple of participants from Afganishtan, Bangladesh were present during the day-long event in tribal dominated Dantewada district which also happens to be one of the hardest hit by Maoist violence.
“Summit like these help foster public-private partnership and share best practices to empower the tribal community”, Shrikar Nayak of NITI Aayog said.
Interactive session on ‘Alternative Livelihood Options’ and ‘Forest and Agro-based Entrepreneurship’ focused on promoting sustainable and inclusive development.