The Lieutenant Governor’s administration has issued a directive with the potential to reshape the employment landscape for border youth in Jammu and Kashmir. The Industries and Commerce Department has been asked to ensure that at least ten young persons from each of the 124 villages covered under the Vibrant Villages Programme Part II are absorbed into the private industrial units being set up across the Union Territory. Simple arithmetic makes the ambition legible: 1,240 jobs, guaranteed, for youth from some of J&K’s most strategically sensitive and historically neglected communities. The intent is sound. The urgency is real. What remains uncertain is what kind of jobs will be offered. The backdrop demands candid acknowledgement. J&K has attracted considerable industrial investment in recent years. Yet for all the investment activity, local youth have remained conspicuously absent from the beneficiary register. Private industry, unconstrained by any obligation to hire locally, has largely drawn its skilled workforce from elsewhere. The reason is that the skills that industry demands are simply not what J&K’s colleges, polytechnics, and skill development centres supply. This structural mismatch is the real stumbling block. Certification without placement has been a recurring failure.
The way forward must be more structural than a directive permits. The most viable long-term strategy is to establish skill development institutes within industrial estates, anchored by the industries themselves, designed around their requirements, and funded through a combination of corporate social responsibility, Government support, and revenue-sharing models. Many states have a dual education system that integrates classroom instruction with factory-floor apprenticeships, offering a model well worth studying. Within a few years of such a model taking root, J&K’s youth would constitute a genuinely competitive workforce capable of occupying the majority of skilled positions across these units.
The Government’s intent is clear. The LG’s directive provides the political mandate. What is now required is a concrete, time-bound proposal from the Industries Department that translates this intent into an institutional framework. That proposal must specify the modalities of industry-led training. This is a long-term investment in making border communities economically self-sustaining, reducing out-migration. The Industries Department must act without delay. The Vibrant Villages Programme offers a rare convergence of policy priority and political will.
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