Experts Call For Focus On MSMEs and Grassroots Innovation "Only sector that can provide the employment to the teaming millions is the MSME sector."

The agriculture sector employs 50 per cent of the total working population and only produces 18 per cent which means that is too much of a disguised unemployment in agriculture, Subhransu Sekhar Acharya, Chairman - cum- Managing Director, National Small Industries Corporation said.

He was speaking at the panel discussion on how g, academia and industry can foster a sustainable tech and start-up hub, at 14^th edition of Entrepreneur Summit 2024, in Bharat Mandapam.

Speaking on the employment he said, "Only sector that can provide the employment to the teaming millions is the MSME sector. And when I say MSME sector, it also includes start-ups because start-ups are also subset of MSME superset."

He said that Innovation is important and we need grassroot level innovations. "We need wealth creation at the grassroot level. It's not just at the technology start-ups, but start-ups who are taking any idea or even making any improvement in the existing products and processes."

When asked about innovative environment Centurion University is creating for future entrepreneurs, Prof. Mukti Kanta Mishra, Founding President, Centurion University said that a lot of people who have not heard of Centurion because we are a very remote rural tribal area University.

"We are least visited. We are very invisible. That's why we have to be innovative. We have no choice. We are not just inclusive, we are also very integrated into the education system, because you deal with school dropouts to PhD scholars. The innovation is intrinsic into our system," Mishra said.

He said that we don't get the support from the industry, we can't innovate. So we don't do that. If somebody is doing it, we'll implement it. "Innovation is not always to create a new thing. How you scale it up is also very important for us and it is for our survival," he added.

He also said, "We don't try to create job consumers. We try to create job creators. We also don't want productive citizens instead of developing entitled clients of the country.

Speaking further on innovation, he said that we only talk about B to C and C to B businesses but we are not talking about the innovation. "There is nobody who has said B to B Innovation.

Rahul Kulshreshtha, Strategic Alliances Division Office of Principal Scientific Adviser Government of India who was also present at the panel discussion, said that we should actually go forward, and we should focus on all different areas.

"We have three focus areas. One is sustainable development goal. Talking about the technologies related or which is impacting SDGs. The second is emerging technologies and the third area which we have is the social impact technologies," Rahul added.