How fast India will grow in the coming years, and how vast and varied the employment opportunities will be for the youth, depends on how well we encourage the entrepreneurial urge amongst our people. Agri-incubators such as SABAGRIs, have a critical role to play in assisting budding entrepreneurs by incubating their companies. While entrepreneurship in agri-business domains is important for the nation, it is equally important to open markets for new products and services in a country with a rapidly growing appetite for these. Rural markets are very important in this context; however, they often require new business models, and products and services fine-tuned to the differentiated needs and sensibilities of the rural consumer. The Sabour Agribusiness Incubators (SABAGRIs), BAU, Sabour is playing a pioneering role in this regard. Since 2019, SABAGRIs has nurtured the establishment of 97 start-ups (Pre-seed Stage & Seed Stage) in a variety of agricultural domain.
SABAGRIs’s thrust has been to incubate rural/socially inclusive start-ups, particularly those with the dual challenge of being profitable enterprises even as their impact is socially relevant. The signs are emerging that, as an incubator, SABAGRIs can indeed give impetus to the establishment of social startups that go beyond technology and science and impact society positively. SABAGRIs must now strengthen its model to greatly enhance the scale and scope of its support so that it becomes the lodestar for anyone with a dream to create a successful venture in rural India.