Dr. Ramandeep Singh, Dr. Maria Afzal, Dr. Navneet Kaur Gill and Ms. Roohi
School of Business Studies, Punjab Agricultural University
New Delhi: Employment is the primary source of income which empowers individuals with economic power. Be it male or female, it is important to work for getting paid. In particular, women feel more empowered and powerful while working and earning. Through empowerment women gains ability to take decisions and contribute in family significantly.
Women’s self-worth, employment position, awareness and decision-making power are key facets of women empowerment. Now is the time to make women aware about opportunities available and follow their passions and contribute to nation’s development.
Neelam Singla, 46, founder of ‘Healthysouls. She was a homemaker with passion for cooking, which ultimately led her to path of being a millet entrepreneur. She has chosen to take up millet business, because of the love for healthy body and souls. Her enthusiasm motivated her to create separate identity.
Initially, she started her career being a lecturer, but due to certain family demands she dropped her job after 2 years.
Once her kids soared to maturity and became independent enough to perform their chores, Mrs. Neelam thought of following her dedication. She used to read a lot of magazines and research papers on health and nutrition. This makes it very clear that research not only provides with latest information, but also leads to adopt evidence-based approaches. It acts as a driver for innovation and creativity.
She experimented in her kitchen to develop products that were healthy and also beneficial for ecosystem. She used kitchen as a tool to become entrepreneur. For women without technical skills, kitchen can be utilized as a source to transform their culinary talents into successful businesses. It is very clear that dedication and interests can be utilized as opportunities. One should be motivated enough to shape goals into reality. Clearly women are breaking societal norms, by converting their homes into business ventures.
The dream of providing a healthy body and souls got a shape when Punjab Agricultural University’s assistance comes to Mrs. Neelam. The PAU’s incubation center provides various incubation facilities to young entrepreneurs and food industry. Moreover, it conducts short courses and training programs to develop entrepreneurship skills to increase effectiveness and efficiency in Food industry operations.
Mrs. Neelam attended certified courses by Punjab Agricultural Management & Extension Training Institute (PAMETI) and also got interested in some new ideas of venture on biodegradable cleaning agents in PAU, which is beneficial for ecosystem, along with Art of Living classes.
PAU had brought a great treasure to her as PAU helped her in revealing her aspirations and developing the skills for the business. Women entrepreneurs can avail more services of PAU to empower themselves, by getting the help of NIDHI-TBI also, a project for incubators. It seems that engaging in various courses equips women with business skills. Additionally, it develops their confidence in running business units independently.
Finance is lifeblood of Business. Mrs. Singla has started working on small scale.Primarily, she started her business with her own savings. The money which she gets from her husband for household chores, she saved it and started to evolve the idea of millet’s business into reality. This depicts that she must have been saving for quite a while to start Healthy Souls.
Presently, again she is dependent upon self-funding and self-help group named Kitchen queens. Kitchen queens is a self-help group which involves 10 ladies. It deals in pure, healthy, and millet-based goods. She has created a cycle in which she invests her savings and reinvests her profits.
Empowering women through financial literacy and awareness leads to social justice and women empowerment. There is need for Mrs. Singla to update her financial knowledge so as to achieve objective of growth. Without investment growth is not possible. In order to genuinely empower women entrepreneurs,their self-savings should be supplemented with access to larger funding choices such as grants or micro-loans, which will allow them to scale their businesses more successfully.
As a new agriprenuers, it was difficult to get a perfect marketing strategies, because of limited resources but PAU again becomes a best platform to start with.
As this institute helped her to gain maximum contacts for having word-of-mouth strategy of selling and promoting the Millet-based products in the market along with platforms given by PAU to exhibit their products in Kisan Mela every year twice to boost demand. With a lot of pros, there is few cons also in our life. Same happened with Mrs. Singla, when, word-of-mouth alone can’t provide good results, now she wants to overcome the challenge of upgrading her marketing skills as lack of
the same will limit potential. She can avail various online courses and attend workshops to develop her skills. She can use technology as well like AI such as Chat GPT, Meta AI etc. to avail its benefits.
The contentment of life is where the work- life balance is. Mrs. Singla is so happy and content with the idea of starting the business from her kitchen. Her claim to manage her life and work become so easy at home and with her children. Her life’s main support are her children and Husband.
The foundation of happiness starts from our family itself. As the women need empowerment, they need to be a primary contributor to economic and social development. For that matter, women require fair and stable conditions in order to play a vital and important role in the advancement of their career, personal growth, social or economic condition of a country.
The motivation behind her transition, from being a home maker to an agripreneurs, are her kids. Family support is very important when it comes to working women. Mrs. Singla is blessed with it, so she can do wonders with her family right at her back.
Inspirations comes from within, our loved ones and near and dears, like wise Neelam Singla got this from their own kids, and the Punjab agricultural University’s training programs have helped her a lot to take over this business. The passion and love for the ecosystems, makes her content, while doing this business.
Ecosystem is another source for her inspiration. She loves to develop products that are healthy, since she thinks that “soul will be healthy with healthy mind and healthy environment”. Her happiness lies in the self-satisfaction of doing work harder and harder for our eco-system.
Grossly, women empowerment leads to increase in income of the family and eventually to the economic development of a country, especially like India. We needmore Mrs. Neelam Singla in our home to bring the productivity and enlarge the healthy markets for our coming generations.
In state like Punjab, where literacy rate lags behind, especially for women, empowering women can bridge this gap of educational and social mobility blocks. Empowering women is not only a moral duty but also a calculated decision that will benefit the states economy, societal well-being, and sustainable development.