M A I N   N E W S

Plan to raise job prospects of 1 lakh Kashmir youths
Five-year plan talks about training & employing youngsters
Aditi Tandon/TNS

THE Recommendations Placement-linked training for one lakh high school passouts over five years Industry designed job training for 40,000 college passouts over five years: Kashmir University, Islamic University to facilitate; Infosys, WWFI, JCB, TCS, BILT etc to train 5,000 scholarships a year for students wishing to study general, engineering, medical education in colleges outside J&K Report stamps Union Minister Salman Khursheed's proposal to hold a conclave of top Indian private schools like DPS and pursuade them to reserve seats for children from J&K Faculty enhancement programmes for Kashmiri teachers by Infosys Development Centres IGNOU to set up regional placement cells in Srinagar/Jammu to allow prospective employers to communicate with job seekers Revival of J&K Finance Corporation; 100 crore grant to help it repay debt

New Delhi, March 3
Prime Minister’s Expert Group on Employment in Jammu and Kashmir today recommended a five-year plan worth Rs 761 crore to enhance the skills and employability of up to one lakh youth from the state.

The 78-page report, in a departure from the earlier attempts of this kind, talks about educating, training and employing Kashmiri youngsters not essentially in the state but outside it. In that sense, it encourages the Kashmiris to break their shells and emerge out. It also proposes a Central implementation mechanism to monitor the progress of the recommendations.

“We met several youngsters during the preparation of the report and got a sense that they wanted things done. It’s time to do things. Resources will be set aside,” C. Rangarajan, former RBI Governor and chairperson of the expert group today told The Tribune while the report admitted that though J&K had shown high economic growth, it had not been able to meet the aspirations of its youth, who comprise 30 per cent of the population.

Under the second scheme, 20 companies will run special training programmes for enhanced employability of 8000 youth of the state per year. About 40,000 youngsters will be covered and taken out of the state for training. Infosys and IIIT Bangalore have submitted a plan and companies like TCS, Godrej and Boyce, BILT, Crompton Greaves and Apollo Hospitals have committed; each will foot 50 per cent training cost. “Some companies have promised absorption of youth,” the chairperson said.

The third recommendation is for quality education access to J&K youth and recommends a special scholarship for students wanting to go in for general, medical or engineering studies to government or private colleges across India. Exactly 5000 scholarships per annum will be given for five years - of these, 4500 for general degree courses; 250 each for medical and engineering.

“The recent turmoil in Kashmir was indicative of the alienation the youth are suffering. When we spoke to them, they sounded like any other young kid wanting to get a life. We are trying to get the Kashmiris to partake of the opportunities available to everyone in the country,” another member of the group said. Any ward whose parent earns less than 4.5 lakh per year would be eligible.

Rangarajan panel submits report
Ehsan Fazili/TNS

Srinagar, March 3
A group of experts constituted for formulating a comprehensive job plan for the youth in Jammu and Kashmir handed over its report to Chief Minister Omar Abdullah here today.

The group headed by C. Rangarajan, Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, was constituted amid the unrest in Kashmir last year.

“We are thinking in terms of launching schemes for one lakh jobs in the next five years”, Rangarajan said after releasing the report at the Sher-i-Kashmir International Conference Centre (SKICC). The highlights of the report were skill development and direct employment initiatives and sectoral initiatives. Under the skill development initiatives, it envisaged to provide training to between 50,000 and one lakh youth in three to five years for which a scheme executed in public-private partnership (PPP) would be launched immediately. It also included the launch of a special industry initiative in the PPP mode for enhancing skills and employability of 40,000 youth in five years. “These initiatives are in addition to what the state and Central governments are doing for providing jobs to the unemployed educated youth in the state,” he said in reply to questions.

Speaking on the occasion, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said that it was not possible to create jobs for everybody but “we can create entrepreneurship”. He said that the meaning of a job in the state in general and the Kashmir valley in particular meant a “government job”. The Chief Minister added that no government could create jobs for all. Omar asserted maintaining a harmonious security environment and the maintenance of law and order and unemployment were the biggest problems.

Earlier in his remarks, Minister for Higher Education and Employment Abdul Ghani Malik said that under the Sher-i-Kashmir Employment and Welfare Programme for Youth (SKEWPY), 5.96 lakh unemployed educated youth had been registered so far.