Somewhere right now, a young person from a Scheduled Caste or Adivasi household has a genuinely good business idea — and no clear way to take the first real step toward it. Not because they lack the ability. Because the systems around credit, networks, and confidence were never built with them in mind.
Marginalised entrepreneurs also remain heavily concentrated in casual labour, sanitation, and leather-related trades — rarely in the scalable, professional sectors where wealth actually compounds.
Research by economists Sukhdeo Thorat and Nidhi Sadana Sabharwal found that market liberalisation didn't democratise enterprise ownership — traditional social hierarchies simply re-formed inside modern corporate and credit structures.
Studies by economists Ashwini Deshpande and Smriti Sharma show that SC- and ST-owned small enterprises face measurably worse growth, asset accumulation, and market access than comparable businesses — discrimination that persists at every scale.
Recent reporting on India's venture-backed startup boom describes marginalised founders as functionally absent from high-growth tech — proof that market forces alone haven't closed this gap, and won't on their own.
Give someone information and funding and they still might not walk through the door — because the barrier isn't only external. It's also what decades of exclusion have taught people to expect for themselves.
Generations of exclusion leave many capable young people without the risk-appetite, institutional confidence, or sense of permission that privileged peers take for granted. This is often the quieter, harder barrier to see — and the first one MCESP works on.
When someone does break through with genuine skill and ambition, explicit or implicit caste-based gatekeeping — in credit, in networks, in who gets taken seriously — frequently works to slow or derail their scale-up. Confidence alone doesn't solve this one; institutional backing does.
We don't want this site to read like everything is solved. Here's what our own team and community partners are actively working through, in the open.
A new platform, in a community that has good reason to be skeptical of outside promises, has to earn attention through known local partners and word of mouth — not a launch announcement.
Legal and financial content is genuinely difficult to simplify without losing accuracy — and getting this wrong has real consequences for someone acting on it.
Not everyone we're building for has a smartphone or reliable data — which is exactly why the physical, illustrated side of this programme exists alongside the digital one.
Youth who do scale up sometimes face real social pressure or intimidation for it — which is why institutional backing and legal partnerships matter as much as the initial training.
Every founder's story we tell will include the part that didn't work — the rejected loan application, the pitch that fell flat, the idea that needed a second version. We think that's more useful, and more honest, than only publishing the wins. Growth that looks effortless usually isn't real, and it isn't helpful to the next person trying to follow it.
Read stories from the field →