India is home to a lot of MSMEs and Kirana stores — small business owners who pursue it for the purpose of earning a livelihood. Although technology has developed exponentially over the last decade, these small businesses have not been able to catch up. The few who were able to successfully implement technology in their businesses ended up scaling to national and international levels. The others, however, still work in a fashion similar to the 90's and the opportunity costs of the same are very high for both — the business owner(s) and stakeholders as well as the national economy.

Starting a business has never been easier, thanks to the technology and tools available at everybody's disposal nowadays. Not only that, the costs of starting a business are also very minimal since one can do so from the comfort of their homes through a smartphone. My proposed project, The Hyperlocal Startup Empowerment Project aims to impart these small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs with digital/technology education and entrepreneurship development training programs which is needed to set-up a new business backed up with the latest technology.

The goal is here to accelerate digitization and digitalization in India — something which the Government of India has been trying to push for quite a few years now. The results, however, have not been as satisfactory. Not only will my project contribute to the betterment and empowerment of the business owners/stakeholders/future founders and cofounders, but also to the customers who will have easier access to a wider variety of products — a lot of which cannot be found on e-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart even in 2022. Ultimately, the Indian economy will also get its much needed boost.