Abstract

Chandrakala Hanagi and Neena Joshi

Entrepreneurship is a vital area for overall economic sustenance and development of any nation. Women can be successful entrepreneurs in food businesses as they have qualities and traditional knowledge which are desirable and relevant for entrepreneurship development in this sector. Chamarajanagar is considered as a backward district, with about a 5.08 lakh women population; most of them live in rural areas, lacking in basic infrastructure and far away from structured market facilities. Here many rural women are actively engaged in various small scale food businesses. Hence, this study was conducted to analyse the impact of training and transfer of available technologies on knowledge and adoption among study group. Primary data was collected through pretested schedule by selecting one hundred women entrepreneurs involved in home scale food business. To fill the gaps through training, educational interventions were planned for a sub group of 30 women entrepreneurs involved in food enterprise. After attending the technology transfer programme through training and method demonstration, their knowledge index regarding new food products had increased from 56.7 per cent to 90.32 per cent. Among all the products, ragi (66.66%) and maize (60%) papads were adopted by more number of women entrepreneurs. Technology transfer programme had greater impact on empowerment of women. Around 90 per cent of the participants agreed that training helped in increasing income, self confidence and over all personality development. From the present study it could be concluded that, rural women entrepreneurs having medium innovation capabilities can be motivated to achieve better success in their enterprise and can explore the opportunities to improve their incomes. The technology transfer intervention of the research played a strategic role in improving the knowledge, self confidence and the economic status of the entrepreneur through adopting good manufacturing practices and region specific traditional food product technologies. Hence technology transfer of food based technologies to existing rural entrepreneurs is effective.