MSc

Urban agriculture acts as an indicator of economic development that fosters food and nutritional security, employment, and urban ecological improvement. It is estimated that 68 per cent of the world's population and 50 per cent of the Indian population will be urbanised by 2050, such that it may project up to 400 million urbanised Indian people. Thus, dwindling resources, ecological breakdown and food scarcity could be the major challenges in urban areas towards sustainable development. Kerala, with its rapid urbanization, being a consumer state with high demand for agricultural products and limited availability of land since the late 20th century, provides substantial prospects for sustainable agri enterprises. It was in this rationale, the study was undertaken to examine the entrepreneurial potential of agri-enterprises in urban and peri-urban areas of Kerala. Entrepreneurial potential is operationalised in the study as the perceived desirability, feasibility and propensity of the enterprises in urban and peri-urban areas to evolve as a sustainable business. The study adopted an ex-post facto research design with specific objectives of assessing the entrepreneurial potential of urban and peri-urban agri enterprises in terms of social, economic, and ecological dimensions, delineating the factors affecting the entrepreneurial potential, identifying challenges and suggesting suitable strategies for the development of agripreneurship in urban and peri-urban areas. The study was conducted in the Ernakulam and Thrissur districts of Central Kerala, which were purposively selected based on the criteria that these districts have maximum urban and peri-urban populations. Samples were collected from Kochi and Thrissur corporations and nearby municipalities. Based on the data on agri enterprises that were established within the last three to ten years, 50 enterprises were selected from each district among the three major categories of agri enterprises such as value addition (20 units), mushroom enterprises (15 units) and aquaponics (15 units) to constitute a total sample size of 100. The primary data were collected using a structured interview schedule. The analysis of the socio-economic profile of urban and peri-urban agripreneurs revealed that the majority belonged to the middle age group (44%), male (63%), and the majority (57% each) had a graduation level of education and family occupation (occupational diverisification) as a combination of agri enterprise and service jobs. The majority of the agripreneurs had a medium level of social participation (80%)), training received (68%), mass media exposure (61%), extension contact (63%), annual income ranging between nine to twelve lakh Rupees (37%), entrepreneurial orientation(51%), managerial competency (65%) and economic motivation (62%). The results on socio-economic characteristics of the urban and peri-urban agri enterprises revealed that the majority had sole proprietorship (81%), and 42 per cent belonged to the category of ‘nano’ enterprises (according to MSME classification of enterprises based on investment). Most (45%) of urban and peri-urban agri enterprises have established separate setups on rented buildings. Also majority of the enterprises had an investment ranging between three lakhs to nine lakhs rupees (27%) and nine lakhs to twenty-four lakhs rupees(27%), annual turnover of up to five lakhs rupees (31%), self-finance as major source of capital (62%), engaged both family labour and hired employees (38%), partial credit availing (68%) and medium level of social contribution (73%). The majority of the urban and peri-urban agri enterprises had a medium level of scaling readiness (51%), profitability (38%), product diversification strategies (56%), marketing competence (56%), employment generation (57%), capacity utilization (56%) and ecological sustainability (84%). The results of the Principal Component Analysis to identify the significant components of entrepreneurial potential pointed out that marketing competence (4.11) had the highest weightage, which revealed that strong marketing competence enables entrepreneurs in competitive positioning, where the least weightage (1.14) gained for ecological sustainability suggested that the sustainability aspect has not emerged as a significant component of entrepreneurial potential in this study. The entrepreneurial potential index of each enterprise was computed using Principal Component Analysis. The majority of urban and peri-urban agri enterprises (66%) had a medium level of entrepreneurial potential with index (EPI) ranging from 15.93 to 56.96. Moreover, 15 per cent of them had a low level, and 19 per cent of them had a high level of EPI. The distribution of EPI of value-addition enterprises showed that the majority of the enterprises (72.5%) had a medium level of entrepreneurial potential with index ranging from 38.17 to 68.72. The majority of mushroom enterprises (63.33%) and aquaponics enterprises (53.33%) had a medium level of entrepreneurial potential. Based on the Kruskal-Wallis H test, the value-addition enterprises showed significantly higher entrepreneurial potential with the highest mean index (74.73), followed by mushroom (46.83) and aquaponics (21.87) enterprises. The results of the correlation analysis showed that there was a significant positive correlation between the entrepreneurial potential and the socio-personal, economic, and psychological factors. Factor analysis revealed that among the significant factors, the entrepreneurial potential is significantly influenced by the three categories of factors:1) entrepreneurial competence and economic drive (entrepreneurial orientation, economic motivation, managerial competency and extension contact) 2) financial factors (investment, annual turnover, annual income and asset ownership) 3) Social aspects (social participation, training received and mass media exposure). Poor market access, high cost of raw materials, risk in scaling the business, shortage of working capital and insufficient market awareness were the top-ranked challenges faced by urban and peri-urban agri enterprises. Enhancing market access through providing market promotion skills; building local partnerships for mitigating raw material costs, facilitating scaling up through financial and networking support; ensuring the availability of working capital through customized financial services; backward linkage for high-quality inputs; developing business management skills; advancing technological consultancy for product diversification and developing skilled workforce will help in the growth of agripreneurship in urban and peri-urban areas. Improvement in the entrepreneurial potential to evolve as a sustainable agri-business would largely depend upon addressing these issues and putting focused initiatives into place.