Promote skill development

Over the years, unemployment has been one of the biggest challenges to tackle in Jammu and Kashmir. Experts are of the opinion that skill development initiatives can help in achieving sustainable growth by curbing the problem of unemployment to a large extent.   Apart from the academic upgrade, the UT needs to explore more and expand on technical education. Vocational courses are important in that they help in skill development and therefore development of the human resource. Industrial training institutes established through out India are meant to produce skilled and semi-skilled human resource in order to reduce the burden of government by creating self-employment opportunities. In technical education, Industrial Training Institutes play a vital role as they are accessible to more people due to lower formal education criterion needed for admissions. The ITIs have been fruitful over the years to give the UT skilled labour, but what is unfortunate is that very few among them (ITI trainees) are committed to entrepreneurship. Lack of capital is a major reason that the trained human resource is not able to establish small firms and units. Most of the trained professionals seek jobs (technical, and in technology driven sectors). In fact that has become the primary reason for thousands of trainees to join the industrial training institutes. It is a fact that industrial growth in the UT has been very slow, and the well trained professionals could give it a boost with the establishment of small units across the UT. What is needed is the affiliation of financial bodies or lending institutions and the training institutes with the aim of increasing the number of industrial units or small factories in the UT. Such a plan will not only relieve the government of unemployment problem but will also encourage entrepreneurship and give boost to industrial growth. The training institutes have been neglected and their mission has diminished to just providing skilled work force. One more hurdle for tapping the most out of this skilled human resource is official procedure. Even after securing capital and machinery there are too many formalities and paper work to be completed. To get the best out of ITIs the focus must be not only on their number in the UT but also on making them the institutes of enterprise development. This will create more job opportunities as the units will open up the gates for others. Government jobs are regarded as the safest option of employment. Steps need to be taken to promote skill development in such a way that the unemployed education youth don’t look at the government service as the only source of livelihood.