Women entrepreneurs seek Collector's help

Tiruchi: The Women Entrepreneurs' Association of Tamil Nadu has urged the district administration to extend support for setting up an office and conducting fortnightly meetings of the association in the city.The WEAT, floated by the Centre for Women's Studies, Bharathidasan University, faces difficulty in functioning, owing to the distance between the city and the varsity. The facility that the WEAT seeks could either be in the Collector's Office, District Rural Development Agency, or schools that could be accessed easily by members.

A representation was made to the Collector, Ashish Vachhani, who inaugurated the first conference of the WEAT at the university last week.Since a chunk of the association members constitute women belonging to the self-help groups, the WEAT has sought space in shopping complexes in busy areas, and at `Uzhavar Sandhais' to display and sell products made by the groups.It also mooted the idea of weekly shandies for marketing the products.

The district administration could enlarge the marketing base of the WEAT members by permitting them to exhibit their products on its premises at periodic intervals and ensuring regular order of books, notes, printing, masala powders and pickles to schools.Office-bearers of the WEAT hope to make the association members beneficiaries of the training programme under self-employment schemes and finance linkages with banks, and opine that the district administration could prevail upon banks to extend credit without collateral to over 50 units that function on the basis of business performance.Likewise, under the Cluster Development Initiative, the association has sought priority for accommodating its members in Micro Enterprise Industrial Shed.

Pointing to the lack of provision in government schemes to support existing women entrepreneurs under the Employment Development Programmes, N. Manimekalai, Director, Centre for Women's Studies, said there was a strong need for supporting the members of the WEAT comprising about seven hundred motivated home-based micro women entrepreneurs in the informal sector in Tiruchi, Thanjavur, and Dindigul districts.

Under the aegis of the Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development programme undertaken by the Tiruchi District Tiny and Small Scale Industries' Association, the centre has been linking the WEAT to banks and entrepreneurship promotional institutions.A full-fledged support of the district administration would provide the much-needed fillip to women entrepreneurship in Tiruchi region.