J&K begins fresh exercise to identify unemployed youth to frame job policy

Jammu: With the high number of unemployed youth remaining a cause of concern for the BJP-led government at the Centre, the UT administration in Jammu and Kashmir has started a fresh exercise to identify the total number of unemployed educated and uneducated youth in Jammu and Kashmir.
Sources said the government has geared up its official workforce in urban and rural parts of the UT “to create a database for framing a concrete policy to deal with the gigantic problem of unemployment.
“The fresh exercise has been initiated after the recent visit of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Palli village in Samba district on the occasion of National Panchayati Raj Day on April 24. In rural areas of Jammu region, the government has engaged local teachers and staff of other departments to collect the details of unemployed educated youths who will be placed in different categories on the basis of their qualification,” sources said.
A similar exercise has also been initiated in urban pockets of Jammu and Kashmir.
“We have been asked to collect the details regarding unemployed youth in our village. We are asking youth to submit the copy of the highest academic degree they possess. The database will help the government to frame a concrete job policy to address the problem of unemployment,” said a teacher engaged in collecting data requesting anonymity.
According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) figures, J&K had a 15.6 percent unemployment rate in April, which was 25 percent during the month of March.
Sources said the UT administration has decided to bring down the unemployment rate to below 5 percent by the end of December 2022. “It will be achieved through significant investments coming up to Jammu and Kashmir mainly in the industrial sector. It is expected that it will give a big boost to the private sector. The government is expecting to create job opportunities of 4.5 lakh through its industrial development plan having an outlay of Rs 28,400 crore during the next 15 years,” sources said.
On May 10, India’s unemployment rate was pegged at 7.81 percent which shows that J&K has a quite higher unemployment rate than the national average.
Pertinently, the government had conducted registration of unemployed youth in 2019 before the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic. The exercise was also aimed to have an “exact database of highly qualified, including postgraduate, M.Phil and Ph.D degree holders” because the government had never compiled specific data of postgraduate men and women till that time.
In 2009, the then government held voluntary registration of unemployed youth. Thereafter, the then National Conference-led coalition government, headed by former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, had started the much-touted ‘state policy on employment’--Sher-e-Kashmir Employment and Welfare Policy for Youth (SKEWPY) with an aim to provide jobs to unemployed educated youth of Jammu and Kashmir.
It is mentioned here that the Jammu and Kashmir government does not have any employment policy to address the ‘serious challenge’ of unemployment. They do not even have a ‘real, sound and dependable data base’ of the exact number of unemployed educated and uneducated youth in J&K.
Updated On 5/12/2022 1:11:57 PM