India the 2nd largest populated country of the world, facing many challenges like malnutrition, poverty, pollution, illiteracy, unemployment and corruption due to population explosion.
Among these challenges unemployment is the most critical as it results into stress among able energetic young peoples. Reason behind unemployment are short comes in current education system, lack of technical education, unbalance distribution of wealth and lack of vision in various govt. policies.
Himachal Pradesh is not far behind from this situation. No doubt literacy rate is respectable in Himachal as compare to National average, but still educated young peoples are unemployed. Our education system and mental set up is such that all want so called “white color jobâ€. Most peoples did not try to adopt self-employment and do hard work.
To lessen the ratio of educated unemployed Govt. has started various schemes like Urban Self-employment & Rural self-employment program for youth. Integrated watershed project and MNEREGA for both educated as well as uneducated unemployed. Same time govt. is also organizing and strengthening various self-help groups by providing technical knowledge, financial assistance and platform for marketing but all these programs are not much successful due to improper implementation. Due to day by day increasing populations and shrinking of public sector.
According to our ex-president Dr. APG Abdul Kalam “We should not be an employment seeker but we should be an employment creator, we should also focus to eliminate shortcomes in our education system which results in to educated illiterateâ€.
Youth of Mandi are also facing the same problem of unemployment. In Himachal particular in District Mandi there are not much scope for youth as compare to distt like Kullu, Solan etc due to slow industrialization & lack of natural resources as a result people look only toward Govt sector.
Govt. should provide technical education at large scale and discourage re-employment of retired peoples as is quite prevalent in various ongoing govt. projects. So that trained youth get opportunity which they deserve.
Finally I must say that no govt. can be successful without people participation. So need of hour is that devise various employment program by taking peoples participation in planning as well as implementation
Author: – Tara Sen, Assistant Professor, Botany, VGC Mandi
