A scrutiny of the forces behind the industrialisation of advanced countries would indicate that but for the enterprising entrepreneurs, the economic development of those countries would not have taken place, notwithstanding the fact that the country had abundant natural resources, had a strategic geographic location or had a favourable legal or political environment.

But what are the qualities that make an entrepreneur? Willingness and ability to take risks, innovativeness, interest in seeking feedback on earlier performance, being pro-active, high degree of perseverance, a sense of vision and perspective are some of the essential qualities necessary to emerge as a successful entrepreneur.

India, being a developing country, has miles to go before it can realise its full economicprowess. Despite the fact that India has a huge population and a large pool of technically qualified people, it cannot catch up with the developed countries until it activates its sleeping entrepreneurship. As it has been rightly pointed out, the real bottleneck is where the neck of the bottle is--managers and entrepreneurs, who organise and integrate the diverse economic factors for purposeful aims. If one tries to peep into the type of entrepreneurship development programmes, it will not be easy to identify the lacunae in them. Even the seemingly well intentioned, well designed and well executed entrepreneurship development programmes (EDPs) have failed to deliver the goods. In this context, it won't be an exaggeration that crores of rupees have been spent on the review and monitoring processes of EDPs, but all in vain.

A close scrutiny of the overall perspective under which EDPs are being attempted will provide some pointers towards the possible faults with them. It is a common practice that theparticipation in these programmes is drawn from graduate or post-graduate levelr of education. The participants at this level already have attitudes, beliefs and approach to life firmed up that little can be done to remould them according to the requirements of successful entrepreneural abilities. In this context, the way we groom and educate children during school education is of crucial importance.

Psychologists would agree that attitude formation in children takes place mainly at the secondary education stage.

If we study the syllabi, structure and method of imparting classroom instructions at the secondary stage of education along with the parent-ward interaction, we would come to the conclusion that the secondary stage of education along with overall school and family environment do not augur well with the requirements of developing entrepreneural talent in the country.In the present curriculum, learning takes place through a highly structured environment which emphasises passive learning. Theemphasis is on contents and not so much on the fundamentals of learning. The curriculum related work overload kills creativity, innovativeness and stifles personal initiatives in terms of goal, visualisation and risk taking ability.

Perhaps, this lopsided approach is responsible for the present day high failure rate of EDPs in the country. The output of any system depends on the quality of input. If something is basically wrong with the way the inputs were first of all processed, the subsequent process cannot be faulted. The actual fault lies with raw material processing at the school stage.

This aspect was raised by the author at the `Entrepreneurship Development' workshop held at Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, in 1995 and one of the key resource persons, Prof M Harper, from the Britain's Apex Institute of Entrepreneurship also took serious cognizance of this dimension in the developmental process of entrepreneurship spirit.

A change is most welcome in the education pattern. The emphasisof teaching curriculum must be on developmental aspects so that the most essential and fundamental things are taught first, leaving out the details for later years. Many high level committees have gone into the ills of present day school education but precious little has been done.

Those schools which encourage their pupils to engage in debates, quiz, games, and other extra curricular activities, stand better placed since they provide the climate under which children can learn to set goals for new achievements, take personal risk to participate in those activities (the perceived risk in this case is a chance to fail and be ridiculed by others), mark up one's performance against others (interest in the measurement of output), think of creative ways to defeat the opponents, and organisational and planning experiences. It may be mentioned that the earlier we expose the students to the raw and lower level entrepreneurial activities, higher are the chances that many of them will turn out to be good entrepreneurslater.The parental behaviour system with respect to children also plays a very important role in making nr marring the entrepreneurial skills. The parental environment which pre-supposes that children are highly dependent on them, are immature, need lots of protection--all this terrifies the child to such an extent that children become totally averse to taking rirks, highly defensive, remain immature, get fearful on doing anything new or innovative. The parental environment coupled with the present day school environment kills innovativeness and the risk-taking attitude in children. The Central and state governments must drastically improve the way we are grooming our children because it is only from them that we can pick up tomorrow's business leaders.

The writer is associate professor, Faculty of Management Studies, MDS University, Ajmer