DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

How many entrepreneurs are there in India?

200 millions. 

How come?

Strangely that is a question that has not exercised many brains. I asked this question recently to a lot of people, and the answers I got ranged from well thought out answers like fifty thousand all the way to the adventurous one crore (10 millions). Lots of Googling, Binging and Yahooing later, I still did not have a fix on how many entrepreneurs there are in this vast country of ours.

So, this is an attempt to estimate that number. In the absence of any previous estimates, this is at best a wild guess. So, I will explain my derivation in detail. Any alternate views you have is more than welcome and will help fine tune my guess.

First a definition. Who is an entrepreneur? For the purposes of this estimate, we will define an entrepreneur as anyone who at any point in his or her life has started or owned a business. And an assumption. One entrepreneur can start more than one business and one business can be started by more than one entrepreneur coming together. For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that both of these negate each other out. 

About the only official figure we have is the MSME (ministry for micro, small and medium enterprises) statement first made sometime in 2007 that there are 13 million registered msme's in the country.

My feel is that for every small and micro business that has registered with the government, there are atleast 15 that have not registered. These include businesses running in small villages, your local vegetable vendor, the local taxi business owner and so on. So the total number of small medium and micro entrepreneurs in the country would be (13 + 195), approximately  200 millions. (the rounding off is because of the approximations I am making)

That brings us to the big businesses. The registrar of companies could give numbers on the number of companies registered. Here, one large group typically register many companies for tax and other reasons. So, that number is not a good indicator in our case. So, I am going to make another guesstimate here. I am guessing that only 5% of all entrepreneurs own/run large businesses. That is 95% of all businesses are small medium or micro. Therefore, the number of large business entrepreneurs in the country is (200/95x 5) = 10 millions, slightly lower than the number of registered msme's.

Adding up all these, my estimate of the total number of entrepreneurs in India is in the range of 2o0 millions. Out of a population of 1.2 billions, this is 18 % of the population. Not too bad, but not too good either. 25% would have been more like it, given that the bulk of the 18% are one man shows.