Vocational Training is the key to employment generation - 06/02/2007
Jassi Khangura, the Congress candidate from Qila Raipur has observed that unemployment remains by far the biggest challenge to be overcome in bringing about significant and sustainable socio-economic uplift especially among the rural areas.He insists that skilled manpower and the brand India has now arrived on the stage of the global economy. Immense employment opportunities exist in and outside India and what is needed is to impart employment generating education and training to the youth.
The approach to resolve the unemployment problem needs a paradigm shift – we need to get proactive rather than reactive. Unemployment has its route in the problem of population outburst and education policy. Though the population control measures have shown good results but they will take a long time to eliminate unemployment.
While the government continues to support the unemployed through various schemes, there are a number of initiatives that can and should be undertaken to eradicate the problem – vocational training is perhaps the surest of them all.
There is an urgent need to have a broad based vocational training infrastructure and focused promotional initiatives, which may increase awareness and acceptance among the masses of vocationally trained vis-à-vis mainstream graduates. We now need to create an atmosphere which churns out apprentices who may be globally acceptable.
There already is a large number of success stories among the urban Indian business community, which have proven through the vocational training business model that both the business unit and the apprentice stand to profit from it.
The need of the hour is for private businesses to come forward and take a lead in replicating this success in the rural areas. Jassi says his family has already invested in and saved one such vocational college from closing down but the need is to set up many more.
