Abstract
The central issue of sustainable national development is the creation of sustainable livelihoods. Some IS million jobs have to be created every year to close the un-employment gap in India by the year 2015. Conventional industrialisation is important to maintain competitiveness in a globalising economy but it can hardly create one or two million jobs a year. Employment in agriculture is also reaching a plateau. Thus 10 million additional jobs will have to be created, off-farm and outside conventional industry, every year. Only mini and micro industries are capable of creating this many jobs. To create these jobs without further destroying the environment or the resource base, and in the process generating the goods and services needed by local people, totally new types of jobs of technology and different types of enterprises will be needed from those that exist today. Developing these will, in turn, need new approaches to the innovation and delivery. This paper describes the role of the independent sector in creating large number of Sustainable Livelihoods.
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