Unemployment crisis gets severer

The causes behind the poor absorption capacity of the sectors generating new jobs are well known, and so are the remedial measures suggested by the experts from time to time. But in spite of a plethora of policy decisions by successive governments and the steps taken so far to create new jobs, the job market remains too small for the huge number of new entrants to it. We believe matters must improve substantially in two key areas. First, rural unemployment has to be addressed by increasing the number of agro-projects with a focus around opening avenues for self-employment based on optimum utilisation of micro-credit facilities. These, in some measure, have already injected a measure of life into the rural economy; but a lot more needs to be done considering the population growth and the corresponding rise in the number of the unemployed.

Simultaneously, the manufacturing sector, now chiefly concentrated on the garment industry, needs to be diversified. The flow of FDI and other forms of investment continues to stagnate at an unsatisfactory level. To increase the flows of investment, poor law and order situation, infrastructural inadequacies, bureaucratic bottlenecks, and above all, factors of political confrontation must be overcome.

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The economists have also identified the essential feature of our manufacturing sector like scarcity of capital in contrast to abundance of labour. We are still nowhere near overcoming the disadvantage and making the best use of the vast labour force. The drawback lies in its rather unskilled nature, but it is the economic planners' first and foremost task to find ways of upgrading it into a skilled force that can be a big asset.

The unusually high number of the unemployed among the uneducated youth is a great concern as it has a direct bearing on the growth of terrorism and anarchy. It is a ticking time bomb. The problem has to be addressed urgently, and effectively too, before its snowballs into an unmanageable proportion.