Unemployment has been, and continues to be, one of the gravest challenges that Jammu and Kashmir is face to face with. Governments, that be, have been promising moon and stars but nothing is changing on the ground as the overall unemployment rate in the UT is nearly double the national average. In the lack of private sector, the educated youth are forced to look for jobs within the government sectors and it goes without saying that the government is in no position to provide jobs to these youth. It is not even filling the vacancies that are there in various departments forget about creating new jobs.
According to the Baseline Survey Report 2024-25 under Mission YUVA (Yuva Udyami Vikas Abhiyan, the unemployment rate in UT of J&K is 6.7% in comparison to the national average that stands at of 3.5%. It is alarming that a huge chunk of educated youth is jobless. How could this chunk be productive for the society. While campaigning for the assembly elections last year, every political party, made tall promises about generating jobs for the jobless. That the political parties use the issue of unemployment during elections and make big promises conveys in no-non-sense terms that none of them is serious about the issue because had they been, they would tell people candidly that no government, leave aside a single political leader, can provide government jobs to all the unemployed. It is impossible! However, instead of creating alternative spaces for the unemployed youth in private sector, instead of helping them in generating their own employment avenues, they are allowed to drift away into the world of make-believe. This has been happening in the past and this continues to happen.
The government couldn’t provide jobs but it can create avenues. Recently Mission YUVA (Yuva Udyami Vikas Abhiyan) was launched here with the sole aim of empowering youth. With the financial support from the government, this Mission can create enterprises and thus jobs. Agriculture, horticulture, sheep and animal husbandry, fisheries and other such sectors have huge potential and educated youth can revolutionize these sectors if they get proper and hassle-free financial support. While one hopes that this new programme would prove successful but for that the government needs to have the will to deliver. In past too, we have seen launch of several such initiatives which benefited none, or, just a few. It is because the youth here have been deliberately programmed for only one kind of job – engagement in government service, which of course is not and cannot be available for all. The enterprising among them, who want to break the jinx and do something new by generating their own employment, don’t have access to the avenues and opportunities for the same – financial institutions and various governmental agencies being big hurdles in their way. This is despite the government’s pronounced invite to the youth to go for self-employment ventures!
