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This introductory chapter provides an overview of entrepreneurial citizenship. Entrepreneurial citizenship promises that citizens can construct markets, produce value, and do nation building all at the same time. It attempts to hail people's diverse visions for development in India—desires citizens could channel toward oppositional politics—and directs them toward the production of enterprise. In this way, entrepreneurial citizenship becomes one attempt at hegemony, a common sense that casts the interests of ruling classes as everyone's interests. However, this entrepreneurialism is not only a project of the self but also a project that posits relations between selves and those they govern, guide, and employ. Champions of innovation and entrepreneurship often leave this hierarchy implicit or deny its existence, leaving the problems it raises unaddressed. This book depicts the practices by which institutions, organizations, and individuals selectively invest only in some people, some aspirations, and some projects in the name of development.

This chapter examines how champions of entrepreneurial citizenship remake education, proposing that the skills of producing innovation and the skills of taking civic action are one and the same. These educational reforms promise that “every child” can be an entrepreneur. This model appears democratic in that it expands merit or success beyond narrow visions that locate merit at the apex of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or global corporations. At the same time, it naturalizes privilege and resources as leadership and passion. Entrepreneurial citizens appear simultaneously as empathic leaders of entrepreneurs' others and as portraits of what all Indians ought to become. Those who do not lead India, implicitly, should follow. Design in Education, in its optimism and its pitfalls, offers a view into the limits of entrepreneurial citizenship. This form of citizenship promised a model of change, but it also was a new mechanism for development without disturbing existing social orders.

This concluding chapter reflects on entrepreneurial citizenship as a global project, promoted not only by Indian elites but also by the U.S. Department of State and global institutions of economic governance. Ultimately, it argues that the function of entrepreneurial citizenship is to subsume hope and dissatisfaction, redirecting potential political contestation into economic productivity and experiment. It disciplines hopes for the future into forms that fit existing institutional agendas through the language of “viability” and “sustainability.” Entrepreneurial citizenship also invites civil society to extend its reach and relations with poorer Indians, the nation's majority, as consumers. Indeed, entrepreneurial citizens experimented with myriad ways to bring the vast informal economy in its diversity into connection with capitalist production, inviting the poor in as workers, as design research participants, as budding entrepreneurs, and as consumers.

This chapter discusses how politicians and business elites attempt to pose entrepreneurial citizenship as new kind of common sense in response to dilemmas of liberalized development. It shows how civil society responded to the state's call to entrepreneurship. Middle-class Indians put on festivals, conclaves, conferences, and workshops where they translated the call into consultancy, social enterprise projects, and activism in line with their own varied ideological orientations or situations. The proliferation of the norm of entrepreneurial citizenship in specific events, groups, and projects allowed people to pursue their freedoms and respond to their own frustrations in forms compatible with state-coordinated, industry-led national development. Entrepreneurs translated problems into opportunities, and dissatisfaction into exchange value. As such, policy makers saw entrepreneurialism as a prophylaxis against protest, dissatisfaction, and anger; the call to entrepreneurial citizenship redirected blame from structures of power to failures of imagination.