Being Byapari

On the occasion of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2018, Samriddhi Foundation in collaboration with Sano Paila, Appan TV, Internet Market Today and Human Development Center organized an event on 18th November, 2018– “Being Byapari”. ‘Being Byapari’ was the first ever initiative, which aimed at developing entrepreneurship in Janakpur by inspiring new generation and existing entrepreneurs to emerge and engage in a policy dialogue. The event witnessed mixture of ideas from different sectors such as aspiring and existing entrepreneurs, government, social activists, FNCCI members, and media personnel, who contributed to the session by pointing out the problems that hinders entrepreneurship in Janakpur and the possible reforms for the same.

The event was successful enough to extract problems of various sectors. One of the major issue that an entrepreneur mentioned was “Foreign investors don’t invest when they cannot reap enough benefit from their investment”. As per his experience, foreign clients are willing to invest in Nepal which could scale up the local businesses, generating hundreds of new jobs. However, these investors do not find the investment environment conducive as one has to face complex and lengthy bureaucratic process of repatriating the profit into their home country. This has adversely affected the growth of domestic companies.

 Another issue that the entrepreneurs raised was of minimum wage law. The minimum wage law has resulted in a comparative disadvantage for startups outside Kathmandu. Since, these startups need to comply and pay the minimum wage even though the workforce isn’t as skilled as that of the ones available in advanced cities, this acts as a discouraging factor for these startups. One of the entrepreneurs opined that the government should focus on creating quality manpower rather than fixing ceilings for the wage. This not only discourages the startups but also results in the collapse of many.  Thus, policies shouldn’t be Kathmandu centric but must be devised that suits the specific province.

Similarly, trading based entrepreneurs said that the customs needs to be digitalized to make the process more streamlined. Likewise, there is less media coverage as the political issues overshadow the entrepreneurial issues. Also, the entrepreneurs stated that a conducive environment needs to be created to support sustainable startups that not only drive the economy but also encourage entrepreneurs to thrive.

The event ended on a positive note where it was established that there is both potentiality and growth prospects for entrepreneurship in Janakpur if the policy bottlenecks are managed.