Dipankar Gupta, Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi

Development in India is hindered by an under appreciation of change that has taken place in the rural areas in recent decades. Purely agrarian jobs have declined and the rural non-farm sector is now dominant. In most cases these new vocations exist as fairly simple and straight forward examples of individual entrepreneurship: Cobblers, carpenters and locksmiths for example. In all cases they represent an economic sector with a serious, unmet need for government attention.