A QUALITY OF LIFE (QoL) IMPROVEMENT OF THE MINORITY CASTE PARTICIPANTS OF THE MICRO ENTERPRISES: AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT WITH A SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WEST BURDWAN, WEST BENGAL

The Micro Enterprises (MEs) are supposed to be the most vibrant enterprises in any developing country like India introducing appraising performance in production, employment generation and export promotion with a nominal level of input. Besides, they apply their effort to redress of the contemporaneous hazards of our nation like unemployment and resultantly poverty, social unrest etc. In this context, the poor in terms of wealth, literacy, skill etc. feel attracted to join there to improve their Quality of Life (QoL) in nutrition, health, education, wealth/standard of living and societal factors as MEs does not claim higher levels of capital, knowledge and skill to operate them. This progression would spread to the socially excluded deprived castes of our society (Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Communities) suffer due to lack of social respect and recognition and thus the respective community would choose MEs for their self-employment or employment generation. Therefore, question may arise whether MEs could improve the QoL of the participants of the Minority section and if so what is the level of improvement of QoL and how far MEs could improve the QoL of the minority castes in different dimensions (Material Living Standard, Health, Education, Personal activities including work/Occupational etc.) after joining there. Considering the fact, the present study aims at assessing the association between demographic characteristics like Gender, Religion and Marital Status of the surveyed sample individuals and the factors under the dimensions of QoL, comparing the level of improvement of QoL as per the perceptions of the individuals belonging to different caste categories and recommending some suggestions to the connected parties.