Collective resilience in constrained environments: entrepreneurship in a sub-Himalayan community and the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic that started in early 2020 has exposed the thin line between the resilience and vulnerability of businesses. Two-and-a-half years on, this is evident not only for businesses but also for individual and collective health and survival. As is the case for countries around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the Indian economy which contracted 6.6% in 2020 and lost much of the poverty reduction gains made over recent decades. The impact on rural regions already operating in constrained environments was particularly instructive in socio-economic terms. This chapter explores the livelihood generating entrepreneurial activities in a poor village community in the sub-Himalayan region of India. Qualitative data findings show that the community’s income generation was normally planned around sharing work between men and women with the men in daily wage labour and the women running micro businesses. They organized themselves in a women’s Self-Help Group which was the vehicle they used to engage with external agencies, i.e government departments for income generation schemes, resources and selling their produce. Importantly, they also engaged closely with a civil society non-governmental organization to access training, resources and the market. In their entrepreneurial journey, they often displayed an ability to pivot across activities with agility to survive routinely constrained environments. Notably, they also avoided loan funding. They continued this practice during the pandemic, using pivoting to stay afloat by picking up opportunities wherever possible - even if these were short-term. They juggled several initiatives and sometimes kept their original ones barely alive. They innovatively resourced their diverse activities with finances from various sources that avoided debt; they used bootstrapping and pooled resources for some of the functions while pursuing other business functions individually. The community, operating under the constrained environment of a continuous series of crises, used such techniques routinely to keep precarity at bay. These business techniques of survival under a constrained environment gave these entrepreneurs a crisis-preparedness to face the COVID-19 pandemic more as an additional constraint in their lives. This is also an important cue to understanding constrained environment community entrepreneurship generally.