Treading the right path
The challenge to provide gainful employment to the unemployed youth in Jammu and Kashmir is quite huge. This is because the region offers limited scope for generating lakhs of jobs to the deserving people and that too within a short span of time.
The issue of providing jobs to all in the UT is emerging as one of the most challenging tasks that the administration faces, but one thing that can be said with clarity is that the efforts that are going into carving out a plan for the jobless people here will bear fruit very shortly.
Recently the officials have been able to build a database of five lakh young people of the union territory in an effort to map their job requirements. This process will make the effort more sustainable and achievable.
The process of creating a data base forms part of the major plan under Mission Youth, an ambitious programme to empower 50,000 unemployed youth in Jammu and Kashmir through gainful employment.
The move will ensure that the youth in J&K need to be skilled according to their needs and aspirations to enable them to have not only gainful employment, but also a sense of dignity in the jobs they do.
Jobs in today’s market and situations are hard to come. The youth need to tailor made their skills so that they can manage employment with ease and earn handsomely.
There is a need to sharply focus on skilling and upskilling the youth to not only empower them for better jobs but to enable them to set up their own ventures. This simply means that some skilling and upskilling programmes have to be anchored in the concept of ‘learn to earn’.
The youth need to be focused in their approach and they need to avail all opportunities that include self employment avenues as well as the scope for seeking employment in business ventures is tremendous.
Across the globe small ventures are earning and are providing gainful employment to others. But these ventures need to be in tune with the requirements of the local market and industry so that the demand for their services and products grows rather than shrink with every passing day.
The government also needs to get the Mission Youth work out a strategy that focuses on empowering the youth to set up their ventures or start economic activities at new and upcoming heritage, tourist and trekking sites.
Schemes like ‘Mumkin’ and ‘Tejaswani’ can do wonders in this regard as the past experiences have shown that results have been achieved and can also be sustained over a long period as well.
Besides, a special task force comprising top officials of key departments also needs to be constituted to look into areas of convergence and also set out the measures for creating employment opportunities in the new and upcoming fields like heritage, adventure and border tourism.
For this the young members of the society need to be in sync with the requirements so that they can offer world class facilities and services to all those who wish to explore the region.
KV Network
