Why Educated Indians Prefer Employment Over Entrepreneurship?

In order to understand why Indians prefer employment over entrepreneurship, we will have to see the historical reasons that have shaped such a mind-set. The entire society, polity, economy and culture in India has been shaped and influenced heavily by the 200 year British rule which permeated into every aspect of Indian life. Let’s examine the reasons one by one.

Why Indians prefer employment ONLY?

Education started gaining importance as workers realized that the higher skill-sets they acquired the better jobs will be created. But the imperial powers and especially Great Britain tweaked the education system to their own advantage and ensured that the curriculum was such that India became a nation of bureaucrats and shopkeepers.

In India, the Britishers looted much of the wealth and left behind a bankrupt nation that was dependent even on food grains to the outside world. The government provided much of the employment and India remained a predominantly socialist country with a mixed economy. Since capitalism was synonymous with greed and triggered the world wars, business was treated as evil. All businesses were tightly controlled by a license-permit raj and private sector employment was considered a second class employment. Government jobs were only sought after. Managerial positions in private companies were lapped up by the blue-blooded families and India continued to lag behind till 1991.

Salaried employment= Having maximum number of people on the treadmill

• Degrees are required for marriage purposes, social functions, family prestige but in real world and in a recession dominated world, it is skills that count and large-scale unemployment is now the norm.
• To avoid revolt, compensation structures were tweaked to ensure that salaried employees were never too rich nor too worse off to complain and they remained in the workforce during the peak years of their life from 25-45.
• Earlier funds to single bachelors for starting a business were hard to come by but now things have improved as foreign investment through the venture capital route has ensured billions of dollars coming into e-commerce companies, real estate companies, bio-tech, fintech, and foodtech but right now they are all bleeding heavily.
• Back to the 70’s revenue first approach has to followed and valuations, sell-off price of businesses theory should be junked.
• Even today people from smaller towns find it hard to get loans and venture capital is a far-off dream which big boys in big cities play. It is this challenging ecosystem that frustrates young entrepreneurs who decide to take the employment route. The extended recession of 2008 that resulted in worldwide economic slowdown resulted in double-dip recession in 2012. In the west, the ecosystem is such that young entrepreneurs can create a large company very fast on the strength of a robust business model. But in India, unless the brahmanical way of thinking changes where only certain castes are fit for entrepreneurship and the rest others go for jobs, military service or religion. All that has to change in order to pave the way for a brighter future, where we can see young kids under the age of 25 creating string global companies.