Treading Unchartered Path To Success

Women in India have travelled a long, meandering way in her entrepreneurial journey.

- Aparajita Gupta

Starting couple of decades ago as a saree or pickle seller from home, women have now moved on to earn their degrees first before embarking on her entrepreneurial journey. Earlier women used to start their own businesses to support families with some extra penny, but now it is more to establish a career and to make a mark.

In this Outlook Money Women’s Special edition we are featuring 13 such brilliant women who dared to take the challenge of starting their own business and followed their dreams.

The word entrepreneur is derived from the French term entreprender, which means a person who undertakes the task of bringing together various resources and manages them to achieve desired results and take some share.

Entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role in the economic growth of any country and India is no exception. Home to one of the oldest civilisations in the world, origins of Indian entrepreneurship can be traced back to Harappan Civilisation. Since then, entrepreneurship has evolved to a great extent.

Nothing worth having comes easy and the path to entrepreneurship is always strewn with lot of hurdles. More so, for women who are constantly trying to strike a perfect balance between work and life. Social taboos are yet another demon that women endlessly encounter on their way to being an entrepreneur.

The risks of women entrepreneurship vary from perceptions or biases, which at times lead to them not being taken seriously to lower levels of self-belief about sustaining the business while balancing personal commitments.

Few other perils include the inability to raise capital funds often due to relatively limited business networking along with the still conservative social fabric full of biases that sometimes prove to be unnerving for women entrepreneurs, says Shalini Pillay, Office Managing Partner – Bengaluru, KPMG in India.