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| Rosy SKEWPY carries thorns, thistles for professional grads | | ‘It happens whenever bureaucrats are given the role of policy-makers’ | |
AHMED ALI FAYYAZ
SRINAGAR, Dec 13: NC-led coalition government’s decision of assigning the role of policy-makers to serving as well as retired bureaucrats in the crucial matter of addressing the problem of unemployment in Jammu & Kashmir has turned out to be a blunder. It needs just half-an-hour to realise that so-called Sher-e-Kashmir Employment and Welfare Programme for the Youth (SKEWPY) contains nothing for 15,000-odd unemployed youth having graduation and post-graduation in medical, veterinary, agriculture and forestry sciences besides engineering and technology.
Perhaps the best thing in the entire bureaucratic exercise is that it has been officially called neither a package nor a policy but simply a ‘programme’. Authors of the much-hyped 38-page document seem to have to applied little mind on the miseries afflicting the graduates and post-graduates of the professional courses. Rather than fulfilling an election manifesto commitment of creating the job opportunities for the unemployed, they have chiefly revolved around the ruling parties’ invariable argument: ‘Unemployment is a global phenomenon; Government can’t provide salaried jobs to everybody’ et al.
According to a prime tabulation in the document, as many as 4,033 completely illiterate people have also registered themselves as ‘unemployed’ at different Employment Exchanges in the last three months. They have been duly accommodated among 4,47,653 individuals looking for a government job. As against the widely circulated figure of 500,000 youth, not more than 3,67,000 people (including 4033 illiterate) have been found to have registered themselves in the said period.
Amalgamation of professional and common graduates of science, arts and commerce with 67, 100 ‘Middle Pass’ and 4,033 ‘Illiterate’ is perhaps hard to understand. The document makes a mention of 945 Draftsmen and 14,311 Diploma Holders but does not carry a break-up of the unemployed with diploma, degree and PG in various professional disciplines. With such kind of an approach, officials do find it easy to establish that almost all the departments were already over-staffed.
With nearly total thrust on transformation of District Employment Exchanges into District Employment and Counseling Centres (DECCs), skill upgradation, wage employment and Voluntary Service Allowance (VSA), the document makes a generic commitment of filling up all substantive vacancies within the financial year of 2010-11. That one sentence makes it a ‘package’ not policy. It also talks of recruiting 100,000 people in government sector in the next 5 years.
The SKEWPY document does not explain as to how the state government would provide job to nearly 15,000 of the unemployed youth who have degrees and diplomas in various professional courses. While a number of such youth have secured inferior jobs of clerks and Rebar-e-Taleem, others have been hopelessly running from pillar to pillar in search of the jobs they have been trained for after facing tough competitions and spending huge amounts of money. Public representatives, not bureaucrats, can understand the plight of these people when their failure to get a government job results into their failure of getting life-partners. For the fear of reaching close to the age-bar of 37 years, a number of them have already committed suicide.
While sleeping over thousands of substantive vacancies, successive governments in the state have rarely gone for reorganization of departments inspite of the fact that the state of once seven districts has 22 districts today. Every second official happens to be “incharge” in Forest, Power and many other departments inspite of Supreme Court of India’s blanket ban on Stop Gap Arrangement.
Government’s statistics apart, fact of the matter is that a linesman in PDD is holding the charge of 20 to 30 sub stations. There haven’t been Chief Engineers available for three to five substantive posts in PDD. All the hospitals and PHCs are running shortage of 30 to 40 percent staff. With no recruitment of ACFs and Range Officers for the last many years and the last trained forest officer reaching superannuation in a few years, Forest and all of its related departments will be without a trained and qualified officer in the next 12 years. There has been neither recruitment of any technical officer nor rules of recruitment in Forest Protection Force since it was created in December 1996.
On the other hand, hundreds of trained professionals are heading to the age-bar even after having completed their degrees or PGs in Forestry and Agricultural sciences over 12 years ago.
Even after publication of the ‘Employment Policy’ document, nobody can stop officials of PSC and SSRB from making rules and criteria of selection for different posts as per the suitability of their favourites.
After this ‘Programme’, Government will have to formulate a comprehensive Employment Policy to ensure either a salaried government job or parallel avenues in private sector for the technically qualified professionals rather than irresponsibly count them among the huge crowd of 4.47 Lakh unemployed, including 4,033 illiterate people.
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