Address During Interaction With The Members Of Young Entrepreneur School Of Tamilnadu Chamber Of Commerce And Industry

Dynamic Entrepreneurship

I am indeed delighted to be here at the beautiful temple city of Madurai and interact with the Members of Young Entrepreneur School promoted by the Tamil Nadu Chamber of Commerce and Industry. I am happy to note that the chamber is creating an entrepreneurial spirit among the youth of Tamil Nadu for undertaking Industrial ventures and export through various seminars, workshops, debates and in-house training programmes in the southern part of Tamil Nadu. In the years to come, I am confident that this scheme would transform their educated youth as job providers instead of job seekers.

Contribution of Small Entrepreneurs

Friends, I have so far visited almost all the states and Union territories. Various children share with me what their goals are their aim and dreams. Ninety percent of their children tell me they want to become engineers, doctors, scientists, lawyers, administrators, judges and few of them say that they want to become politicians. Only in two states children say that they want to become entrepreneurs: in Gujarat and Maharastra. This indicates the industrial development and the aptitude of the children for taking entrepreneurship, there is a trend in the country for seeking government jobs, both either central or states. In this situation it is a good mission to transform as many youth as possible as young entrepreneurs. I am confident that Young Entrepreneur School will prove to be a significant departure from this situation as it would be working towards empowering the youth to become wealth creators.

Entrepreneurship training is the need of the hour. Moreover, many people have chosen entrepreneurial careers, because they seem to offer greater economic and psychological rewards than the large company route. Recent experiences indicate that the economic progress of few countries particularly the developed countries is due to the contribution of large number of small entrepreneurs employing less than 50 persons in their establishments. We need such entrepreneurs in large numbers in our country for developing and transforming our village clusters into sustainable economic units.

Development of Entrepreneurs

The key characteristics required in an entrepreneur are desire, drive, discipline and determination. I am confident that the young entrepreneur school will promote following important traits among the would be entrepreneurs:

(a) Vision and pioneering spirit.

(b) Being able to see possibilities where others do not.

(c) Always searching for new opportunities and challenges

(d) Being creative - 'able to think out of the box'.

(e) Constantly striving to do things better

(f) Confident about taking risks

(g) Proactive and focused on the future

(h) A good knowledge and skill base.

Now, I would like to share with you an event.

Creativity and the Young

Miss. Darshana Prakasam and her parents belonging to Erode, Tamil Nadu interacted with me on 28th July 2004 at Rashtrapati Bhavan. She is presently studying in USA in class VII. Even though she is being educated in United States she is fluent and proficient in Tamil, her mother tongue. She is a confident girl and has made a self-assessment of herself. She sums up her characteristics as passionate, outgoing, patient, innovative, organized and determined. She has written a number of poems. At present she is keen to take up a project to provide quality education to our rural children. She is confident of motivating other children to join her in this mission and mobilize funds required for this project. According to her a leader should have the following fourteen traits: (a) honesty (b)optimism (c) determination (d) looking beyond (e) judgment (f) problem solving (g) courage (h) being concise (j) collaboration (k) stimulating (l) assisting (m) fervour (n) public speaking & (o) organization.

Darshana wants to be the co-ordinator of the children education programme and she says she will decide what will be taught and how it should be taught. Apart from executing all-important decisions of the programme she would like to oversee the teaching by the volunteers. She proposes to mobilize a number of volunteers with teaching ability to teach the children both in urban and rural areas. Once the children are taught she proposes to use the same children to educate other children in the village. This programme will mainly be targeted to those children in small towns and villages who do not have access to learning leadership skills and are not in a position to exercise their maximum potential. She feels that learning leadership skills is not as easy as learning arithmetic and literature. I am sharing with you this example so that many of you can emulate this model and can become leaders like Darshana Prakasam in many fields and create number of enterprises in Tamil Nadu. I am sure the young entrepreneur school will provide the necessary environment to make you a budding entrepreneur in Tamil Nadu. At this stage, I would like to discuss with you the law of development.

Law of development

How to become competitive? I was studying the development patterns and the dynamics of connectivity between nations, especially in trade and business. As you all know, the world has a few developed countries and many developing countries. What is the dynamics between them and what connects them? Developed country has to market their products in a competitive way to different countries to remain as developed country. The developing country to get transformed into developed country; they too have to market their products in other countries in a competitive way. Competitiveness is the common factor for both. Competitiveness has three dimensions: quality of the product, cost effectiveness and supply in time. Indeed this dynamics of competitiveness in marketing of products by developing and developed countries determines the law of development. We have to see the enterprises with the competitiveness index in mind.

Total Quality Management

I have participated in many space and defence programmes. Putting a satellite in the orbit needs a large rocket system. Rocket system and the satellite put together will have atleast 50 sub-systems and more than 80 thousand components mechanical, electrical and chemical. To put a satellite in the orbit all the systems have to work to full performance requirements. Even one sub-system or one component fails mission will be a failure. The spacecraft, which has been launched, has to work in space for over 10 years with out any failure. It is also true with launching of missile systems. It has to reach the required target by flying thousands of kilometers. The message I would like to convey here is that those in the programme have to learn quality of a product has to be built in during the design phase and carried forward till the test phase. It has to be constantly improved. The man who designs and manufacturers must love what he does. Entrepreneur have to aim for total quality management that is quality design to production, testing leading to market. So this will ensure success of the product and system. I am sure that the Young Entrepreneur School will impart this lesson with real life experiences so that the entrepreneur succeed in their mission from the beginning.

Rural Development Enterprise

Total number of villages in Tamil Nadu are around 16,000 with a population of about 4 crores. Development of these rural areas will need creation of 350 cluster of villages having an average population of one lakh. They could be achieved through Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA) for these clusters. It involves identification of clusters with growth potential and creating Physical Connectivity, Electronic Connectivity, Knowledge Connectivity and thereby Market Connectivity. I am sure many of the entrepreneurs who have excelled from this school will create enterprises in many PURA complexes in Tamil Nadu and improve the lifestyle of our village community and be an active partner in the Developed India Mission.

Conclusion: Leadership Challenges

Generation of creative leaders is a big challenge. It happened in the society at difficult times or in a prosperous time. The creative leadership can be defined as follows:

Creative leaders are those whose leadership styles move from commander to coach, manager to mentor, from director to delegator and from one who demands respect to one who facilitate self-respect.

I am confident that the young entrepreneurs trained in this school will certainly imbibe the quality of creative leaders, and be the partners for shaping Tamilnadu.

My best wishes to the young entrepreneurs and the members of Tamil Nadu Chamber of Commerce and Industry for success in their missions of creating job providers to the society.

May God bless you.