MSME Expansion, Factory-Sector Stagnation and the Non-Farm Employment Transition in Hamirpur District, Uttar Pradesh

This paper examines the structure of industrial activity and non-farm employment in Hamirpur, a Bundelkhand district of southern Uttar Pradesh, using the district statistical handbook series (Tables 1, 29-A, 35, 36 and 38) covering 2020–21 to 2024–25. Three findings emerge. First, registered micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) expanded explosively, from 157 units employing 729 persons in 2022–23 to 3,816 units employing 32,295 persons in 2024–25 — but 99.3 per cent of units and 99.6 per cent of that employment sit in the micro category, and the entire registered base is classified as rural. Second, the organised factory sector is negligible and deteriorating in quality: eight factories account for roughly 8.6 per cent of district gross domestic product, and gross value added per worker fell 38 per cent between 2020–21 and 2021–22 as employment rose 79 per cent without a matching rise in output. Third, the traditional and estate-based industrial apparatus has effectively ceased to function — khadi and village industry units stand at zero, all 147 small-scale units are individually owned with no cooperative or institutional presence, and the district’s single industrial estate reports 59 of 196 plots working with figures frozen unchanged across three years. The paper argues that Hamirpur is undergoing a registration-led rather than a capital-led non-farm transition: livelihood self-employment is being formalised through the Udyam platform without any accompanying growth in enterprise scale, productivity or institutional depth. Data-quality caveats are treated as findings in their own right.