Employment Deptt not running any scheme
Mohinder Verma
JAMMU, Aug 27: The PDP-BJP Coalition Government has failed to make discernible progress on employment initiatives announced by the Finance Minister in the budget despite admitting that rate of unemployment in Jammu and Kashmir has remained a matter of serious concern even after availability of numerous State and Central Governments funded self-employment schemes.
While presenting budget for 2017-18 financial year in the Legislative Assembly in January this year, the Finance Minister Dr Haseeb A Drabu had stated: “Unemployment is a social issue of serious magnitude in Jammu and Kashmir and even as the rate of unemployment is supposed to be very high in the State, we don’t have actual figures for unemployment in the State”.
He had even mentioned in his speech that Employment Department having abundant human resources and huge infrastructure in almost all the districts of the State was not running any employment scheme. “Also there is an institutional network available in the State in form of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), Rural Self-Employment Training Institutes (RSETIs), J&K Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JKEDI) and J&K Craft Development Institute (JKCDI) which if leveraged properly can help in addressing the problem of unemployment to a large extent”, the Finance Minister had further stated.
Accordingly, he had proposed several holistic measures to address the problem of unemployment in Jammu and Kashmir. However, all these measures have remained on the official files till date with no discernible progress on translating the same into reality, official sources told EXCELSIOR.
Aadhaar-seeded registration with Employment Department for applying to Government jobs as well as applying for employment schemes of the Government, which was announced by the Finance Minister, has not been started till date thereby creating hurdles in the way of Employment Department maintaining a centralized database of unemployed youth, sources informed.
The dilly-dallying approach in this regard is notwithstanding the fact that such a step was imperative to provide much-needed real time unemployment data to the State for future employment related interventions, sources remarked.
“Similar is the fate of announcement regarding subsuming of all State-sponsored credit-linked self-employment schemes into a single sector agnostic credit linked which was required to be implemented by the Employment Department”, they further informed, adding “due to delay in initiating this first step even discussion could not be held on incentivizing the scheme by appropriate and adequate interest subventions”.
It is pertinent to mention here that there are 27 employment schemes being implemented in Jammu and Kashmir out of which 12 schemes have 100% funding from Government of India and six schemes are funded up to the extent of 90%. The State Government has its own 9 self-employment schemes being implemented by various Government departments.
The Employment Depart-ment having abundant human resources and huge infrastructure in almost all the districts of the State is currently not running any employment scheme as a result of which services of its manpower largely remain unutilized.
For want of subsuming of State sponsored self-employment schemes no decision could be taken on conducting comprehensive Entrepreneurship Development Program through RSETIs and J&K EDI, which as per the budget announcement, is imperative to equip the beneficiaries with basic managerial and enterprise creation skills.
“Unless the Government allots subsumed scheme to the Employment Department the latter cannot design even an awareness programme in collaboration with educational institutions for fostering entrepreneurial mindset among the youth, which is key to its implementation at the grass-root level”, sources said.
When contacted, Secretary to Government, Department of Employment Kifayat Hussain Rizvi confirmed that exercise to subsume State sponsored self-employment schemes and Aadhaar-seeded registration with Employment Department has yet not reached the logical conclusion. “Government is on the job”, he added.
“There are large number of youth who don’t have Aadhaar cards and there are others whose Aadhaar have some mistakes as such require modifications”, he said, adding “unless these issues are addressed Aadhaar-seeded registration cannot be started”.
However, sources said that had there been required seriousness at all the levels the schemes could have been subsumed till date and Aadhaar registration process expedited especially when the Government itself admits that too on the floor of the Legislature that unemployment is an issue of serious magnitude.
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