29 lakh job-seekers

It is not very surprising that the number of job-seekers in Assam is increasing every year. A front page news-item in the Sunday edition of this newspaper said the number of “educated” job-seekers in the state has reached 28.83 lakh. It has also mentioned that the jobless persons include HSLC and higher secondary-passed youths, graduates, post-graduates, engineering graduates and even MBBS degree holders. The break-up of different categories of unemployed youth according to their educational qualification is interesting: there are here are around eight lakh Class X passed, around 12 lakh Class XII passed, around seven lakh graduates, more than one lakh post-graduates, over 8400 engineering graduates, nearly 900 medical graduates, 300 agriculture graduates, and around 14,000 ITI-passed youth. Though government records describe them as unemployed, the reality is that a large majority of them are unemployable. Any random survey will reveal that the majority of them are not capable of even writing an application seeking a job, be it in English or in their respective mother tongues. The fault however does not lie entirely with them. Rather it is the state’s education mechanism – schools, colleges, and above all, the teachers – which has been producing such a large number of unemployable persons. The good news is that a number of private sector industrial units have come in Assam in the past five or six years. A number of small enterprises have also cropped up across the state, with activities ranging from the hospitality sector to healthcare. All these put together have provided jobs to a few lakh unemployed youth of the state in recent years. While most industrial units of the present time require skilled persons to fill up the vacancies, the reality is that Assam has been lacking in skilled manpower. What impact the government initiatives to provide various kinds of skills to the young people have made is not immediately known. Assam being still largely an agricultural state where more than 53 percent of the total workforce has found direct or indirect employment, one solution probably could be to upscale agricultural and related activities including food processing in order to generate more livelihoods in this area. Similarly, the non-farm based sector too needs a serious enquiry in order to create more employment opportunities. Entrepreneurship is one area which has immense scope of creating employment, and the Government of Assam should take more interest in institutions like the Indian Institute of Entrepreneurship in order to create a mindset among the young people to become job-creators rather than remaining as job-seekers.