Udaan extended to another year

The Home Minister lost no time in trying to translate into practice the observations of his recent four-day visit to the State. He brought a proposal to the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs suggesting that the Special Industry Initiative for Jammu and Kashmir (SII-J&K) Udaan is extended till December 31, 2018.  The scheme was supposed to come to an end by ending December 2017. He has made the recommendation on the basis of what he claims as satisfactory performance of the scheme during the year 2016-2017. The performance record says that during the said period 109 leading Corporate Houses have partnered with National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) under Udaan with a commitment to train youth from Jammu and Kashmir covering Organized Retail, Banking, Financial Services, IT, ITES, Infrastructure, Hospitality and many other sectors.  Till today, 34,587 candidates have been selected of whom 31,903 have joined, 22,237 have completed the training, 7,649 are undergoing training and 14,694 have been offered jobs. These are encouraging figures.
The objective of the plan has primarily been to provide skills and employment to the youth. We find that there are two main goals before the Government in pursuing this scheme. One is of providing employment to the youth with skill and the second is to dissuade the youth from joining the ranks of militants in Kashmir. The premise is that the unemployed youth have the tendency of going after negative activities. This seems a good idea and the Home Minister is reported to have said that if the scheme is not extended it will have reverse effects. We are happy that employment has been provided to thousands of youth and by extending it to one more year, another lot of large group of youth will benefit from it and that goes in national interests.

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