Evaluation of Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Program (SVEP) in Samnapur Block of Madhya Pradesh

Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Program (SVEP) is one of the world’s most extensive village entrepreneurship programmes to transform rural India into an entrepreneurial hub. This paper performs the first impact evaluation of this scheme in one of the implementing blocks of Madhya Pradesh. The study uses mixed-method research to complete the programmatic, quantitative and qualitative analysis, thereby highlighting the bottlenecks in the existing policy from the grassroots. As per the quantitative analysis, the scheme has achieved a 45.3 per cent decrease in migration. 84.2 per cent of respondents reported an increase in monthly food consumption, and 53.5 per cent of respondents reported improvement in their socio-economic condition. Moreover, the case narratives and cross-case analysis provide the beneficiaries' perception of the scheme and how SVEP has created an entrepreneurial attitude among women. The study also focuses on delivering programmatic suggestions to overcome the scheme's bottlenecks and build a rural startup ecosystem.