Dr. Falendra K. Sudan
The demographic structure of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) economy is changing fast. The future prosperity and sustainability of J&K largely depends on the ability to tap the youth potential. In the era of economic slowdown, our state needs youth to be a driver of inclusive growth. However, the current scenario is not favourable for the youth due to joblessness. Youth transition from education to labour market is becoming highly cumbersome with increased duration of joblessness, availability of temporary contractual jobs, if any and working on jobs below qualifications. All this causes delays in initiating independent lives and less motivation to start a family. If the current situation prevails for longer period, it results in smaller future earnings, more poverty and wastage of human capital. In conflict settings, we are facing the risks of the emergence of a new lost generation. The life perspective of youth is becoming bleak. It may have dire socio-economic impacts causing lower societal well-being and poor human development in future. Therefore, there is need to explore the challenges facing youth of J&K so that they may be able to address life situation as per acquired capabilities and promote inclusive growth.
Challenges and Policy Options
Youth unemployment especially among educated has risen very sharply with economic slowdown. To address the problem, new employment provisioning mechanisms have been implemented. These are mainly flexible and contractual in nature. These are causing growing job insecurity and systematic exclusion of youth from the labour market. Youth have less options of moving to professional careers. A significant proportion of youth are moving directly from education to unemployment or temporary and contractual jobs, not matching their qualifications and skills. This is resulting in growing discontent and threat of a ‘lost generation’. This will expose to youth to multi-faceted disadvantages including poverty, exclusion, disaffection, insecurity, offence and crime, and psychological health ailments.
All this calls for a deeper analysis of short-term and long-term impacts of emerging youth scenarios on economic, social and labour markets. There is also need to analyze psychological impacts of job insecurity and labour market exclusion in gender perspective, focusing on life income prospects, household and family formation, physical and mental health and wellbeing. The youth labour market challenge calls for an early policy response. A better understanding of the labour market mechanisms will lead to a more robust employment and education and skill development policy.
Project Udaan
In the recent past, there has been growing mobility of youth from J&K to other parts of the country for education specifically technical and professional education and later labour market absorptions elsewhere. The development in information and communication and technologies (ICTs) during more than two decades has attracted the talented youth in new emerging metropolises of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Greater Noida, Gurgoan, etc. to showcase their education and skills. The government has initiated a new skill development project Udaan to train and equip the educated youth of the state to take up suitable jobs in multi-national companies (MNCs) and trans-national companies (TNCs) elsewhere. One of the drawbacks with most of the youth of J&K is the lack of mobility and greater feeling of homesickness which impedes the very purpose of the project Udaan especially in case who have not been out earlier for getting education and training. Out of the educated youth who have been trained under Udaan, a very high proportion of them returned home after completion of the training or left mid-way and only a small proportion of the trained youth have been absorbed in labour markets, if any. At the same time, we have not a good functioning labour markets including industries and corporate in J&K. Thus, lack of absorptions internally and not actively absorbed elsewhere fails to reap the benefits of promoted mobility of our educated youth in right perspective.
Keeping in view the bleak job opportunities for youth in J&K, the labour markets elsewhere in the country may offer better prospects, sometimes not very distant from the state, may be the National Capital Region (NCR), the Greater Noida and the Gurgoan. All this calls for a more integrated and better functioning labour market. However, youth attached to kith and kin cannot be forced to migrate to other states as this may disrupt families. Keeping this in view, there is need to analyze patterns and types of youth mobility from J&K to understand their characteristics, purpose, their selection and recruitment processes, length of stay, motivation, problems faced regarding language, integration, settlement, new life, etc in gender perspective. There is need to analyze the skills acquisition and recognition and their employment impacts including career prospects, bonding, settlement and welfare, and impact of mobility on mental health. All this will help evolve policy development to facilitate and improve youth mobility and integration.
Adult Education
Another challenge faced by youth of J&K is inappropriate investment in adult education and skill development, which fails to overcome the economic slowdown and thereby not meet the targets on employment generation, poverty reduction, and inclusive growth. The markets for adult education are likely to emerge in near future. The University Grants Commission is operationalising the scheme of promotion of the community colleges to rope the 10+2 pass outs in flexible vocational stream and providing the youth with industrial trainings through academic and industrial collaborations. However, despite several efforts in this direction, adult education remains inadequate in J&K. It is a well known fact that unemployed youth, low skilled and vulnerable workers actually benefit less from adult education opportunities than other more advantaged groups. Besides, there has been persistent weakness and ineffectiveness of adult education policies in promoting public-private partnership in skill development and training among the youth.
Therefore, there is need to review the adult education scenario in J&K so that existing initiatives should deliver the intended benefits and address the needs of those young people not in education or training or those in situations of social exclusion. This is possible only if robust adult education policies are designed and put to practice. In this context, the role of complementarities between public policies and dynamics of private markets are needed to be addressed to improve informal learning and its effectiveness. Not only this, there is also need to collect sound data and information for developing synergies and avoiding overlaps and sustaining strategies for simplifying the access to information and support policy making. There is also need to undertake a systematic impact analysis of adult and continuing education policies to avoid mismatch in demand and supply of skills in the future.
Summing Up
Keeping in view the increasing globalization, there is need to pay greater attention to the challenges of changes in lifestyles of youth, their consumption patterns, housing design and urban growth, inter-generational relations and their daily lives. These challenges call for greater participation, willingness and personal commitment of youth to build our future society. Youth are confronted with scenarios contrary to their parents and grandparents. They have wider role in shaping not only their today and tomorrow, but they will also determine the shape of our economy and society in the years to come.
In this context, the youth’s norms and values, their expectations, organizational skills and business ethos possessed by them have a determining role to act as a driver of change for inclusive growth. Thus, there is need to identify the opportunities and obstacles to foster a sustainable and innovative society with youth as vibrant, energetic, catalysts and inhibitors of socio-economic transition. Above all, youth represent both the present and the future of the state. Therefore, there is need to explore the ways to engage youth in shaping its future. The distrust among the youth needs to be removed by making them real stakeholder in democratic life. They should be encouraged to act as active citizens and participate in shaping the future of J&K.
(The author is Professor, Department of Economics, University of Jammu, Jammu)
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