By Dr Prageetha G Raju
Dr Prageetha G Raju is an Associate Professor of HRM and OB at the Dept of Business Management, Symbiosis Law School, Hyderabad.
Entrepreneurship and social justice are innately different concepts with a focus on capitalistic and equity frameworks respectively. Succinctly, self-reliance, risk-taking, and independence are characteristics of entrepreneurs; equal distribution of opportunities, rights and responsibilities, and privileges are features of social justice. Thus, they can be merged to resurrect individuals/communities from victimisation, saving them from obscurity, insecurity, humiliation, and lack of respect.
Establishing the relationship between entrepreneurship and justice
Today, India is a ground for heinous crimes on individuals and communities because of dehumanisation and criminalisation. Illiteracy, economic and financial hardships, abduction, superstitions, political instability, love and subsequent elopement for marriage, changing attitudes towards morality and sex create a context for all the atrocities, especially on women. Atrocities on individuals render the victims (especially women) shattered, battered, penniless, coupled with skewed identity, poor self-worth, helplessness, and hopelessness.
Coming to rescue and restoration, there is help but not enough hope. To succeed, they need tools to capitalise on the strong spirit of resilience regardless of their ability to survive. Therefore, entrepreneurship and social justice are not a dichotomy but are dependent; entrepreneurship cannot survive without a justice framework. Thus, enterprise serves as a context for securing social justice to empower individuals, drive dreams, push technology, promote collaborative work models, create jobs, and re-humanise the human nature of the business.
How does entrepreneurship give a new lease of life?
Can entrepreneurship give social justice to victims? Yes, a fair justice system should promote entrepreneurship for victims to enable them to participate in public life with dignity.
Rape victims are turning to become entrepreneurs. Rape is characterised by physical pain, mental trauma, social stigma, and a diminished social confidence. Medical help and trauma handling centres are available, but can the lost public dignity be restored? Indeed, it can be done through entrepreneurship. Sunitha Krishnan, a rape victim herself, co-founded PRAJWALA, an anti-trafficking NGO organisation in Hyderabad to help exploited and tormented women through entrepreneurship. PRAJWALA believes that entrepreneurship acts as a context for economic rehabilitation of victims to provide financial independence, sustain survivors social reintegration and psychological well-being, and encourages them to find an underestimated force within themselves through training and bestows them with resilience. The livelihood training is selected based on interest and aptitude of the survivor/victims as well as the market viability of the trade. PRAJWALA came up with many avenues of entrepreneurship for victims such as cab driving, welding, carpentry, lamination and screen printing, bookbinding, and so on.
Mushrooming institutions
Coming to refugees, they are created by persecution and wars. Refugees comprise men, women, and children, who undergo harrowing conditions at the hands of iron-fisted rulers, lose their loved ones, homes/properties and turn nomadic running for shelter to neighbouring nations. Unfortunately, their governments cant and wont protect them. Afghan refugees in India are mostly seen in New Delhi. Is there hope for them? The UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ Project Livelihood is promoting self-reliance for the refugees living in Delhi. Hotel Ilham (means inspiration) is making entrepreneurs out of illiterate, widowed refugee women (spouses killed in the war) with children. Afghan delicacies are becoming popular among Indians too. Green Leaf Restaurant is an initiative from the Afghan male refugees. There is also an Afghan healthcare enterprise fetching throngs of ‘medical tourists’. Afghani embroidered shawl costs between 10,000 to 30,000 INR depending on the pattern, design, and technique.
Center for Social Development (CSD), an NGO in Jaipur, promotes entrepreneurial skills training to socially and economically underprivileged women who suffer domestic violence. Since it is the husband and in-laws who perpetrate violence daily, the bruising physical and psychological effects dont heal. CSD trains women on footloose crèches, a centre for unattended children whose parents are working on sites. CSD chose these groups because, besides pain, these women are severely malnourished too.
Creating entrepreneurs out of zilch
Tihar Fashion Laboratory is a unique idea to upkeep restorative rehabilitation at Delhi prisons, in collaboration with Pearl Academy to provide women prisoners with enabling skills to create avenues for self-employment and lead an independent life after serving a sentence. The women inmates are undergoing training in fashion technology. The Presidency Correctional Home in Kolkata too began training inmates to sew Nehru jackets, kurtas, shirts, harem pants etc. Coming to ex-convicts, especially those who served murder sentences, social stigma is stronger; reintegrating them into society is almost impossible. Two ex-convicts run an Auto Garage works and a departmental store in Coimbatore; another ex-convict runs an eatery in Trichy; one completed BA through correspondence; one is running a call taxi service in Kerala. All these ex-convicts learnt basics of motor mechanics, cooking, languages, and driving in the Jail. Have the jails become institutions of transformation to give a renewed life to inmates to lead a dignified public life? Yes, they have!
Coming to acid attack survivors, the trauma and pain are unbearable; added is the disfigurement ostracising their existence from the public life. With scars snaking on their faces, these women began SHEROES, a hangout on the Agra road which reflects a shifting attitude toward survivors of acid attacks and to the crime itself in India. Another victim, 15-year-old Rupa, learnt needlework and sewing in this murky judgmental society and started a boutique near to SHEROES.
Coming to LGBT entrepreneurs, there are a good number of them. However since not many LGBT people are vocal about their identity, the community at large lacks role models.
Promoting social justice
The above cases indicate social integration reflecting social cohesion, institutional foundation, and a culture of acceptance. Social justice creates a society/institution based on principles of equality, solidarity, values, human rights, and dignity of every human being. Social justice is being expanded through entrepreneurshipa transformative process of using new ideas to solve social problems.
Entrepreneurship is also an issue about social justice. Some fight for justice and equality to transform the world, some labour for commercial gain. Victims turned entrepreneurs focus on transforming the world and launch a dream. Under such circumstances, the concept of business as a commercial and profit-making entity crumbles, given the face of human reality. For all the victims, business is learnt on the battlefieldfor them, business stands for sustenance, resilience, deliverance, and dignity because entrepreneurship restores social justice.
Under the Indian Constitution, social justice comprises social and economic justice through a large number of judgments and acts with timely amendments. The Preamble promotes social justice through Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles, and various Articles. The aim of social justice is to attain a substantial degree of social and economic equality, which is the legitimate expectation of every citizen of the society. Economic justice involves the elimination of glaring inequalities/discrimination in wealth, income, and property. A combination of social justice and economic justice denotes what is known as distributive justice. In a developing society like ours, with ever-widening gaps of inequality in status and opportunity, the law is a catalyst to reach the ladder of justice and entrepreneurship is the means to climb.
Renovating the judicial system
In contrast, can law become a harbinger of social justice with millions of pending cases? We believe in ad-hoc solutions; thus we treat symptoms than uproot the problem itself. If women are raped in cars, a dark film on car windows is banned; when pollution increases, Diwali is banned. Symptomatic treatment results in people defining and developing their own environment because of differences in perception. Nirbhayas case amended the rape law, but the rape of Suzette Jordan deepened humiliation holding her soiled panties on to a stick during the trial. As a result, social justice, equity, and equilibrium are quivering. If rapists and other criminals get convicted faster, criminality would gradually decline; India can build great institutions to pursue lofty objectives.
In countries whose priority is social equilibrium and justice, building and sustaining an efficient judicial system happens quickly. In India, citizens want justice along with policies, licenses, enforcement, regulations, political ideology definitions and metaphysical conflicts resolution. Indian judiciary would get jammed as an institution. We dislike survivors narrating their tales of violations, thats why institutional frameworks function at a snail pace. But, now, hundreds of women are embracing women empowerment through business to show that they are not victims, but winners. A just legal system shall encourage and facilitate entrepreneurs through the creation of entrepreneurial opportunities whose results thereby shall confirm the importance of social justice as part of the institutional environment.
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