Deciding Employment

Editorial:-
After over a decade of trying to inspire the youth towards gainful self-employment, entrepreneurship or private sector employment, the State government has now also taken a policy decision to extend unemployment allowance. Only the policy announcement has been shared thus far and details of how this ‘allowance’ will be dispensed are awaited. Coming as it does in an election year and in a political charged time, and given the less than mediocre level of professionalism among its bureaucrats and the complete absence of an earnest civil society, it is unlikely that this initiative will be allowed to be anything more than a sop. One hopes though that this allowance does not end up encouraging indolence because its real role should be to support an unemployment youth in her/ his search for employment. It is important that this allowance is extended in such a way that it sustains efforts to find employment and does not become a sop which rewards the status of remaining unemployed. And this should be an initiative which the unemployed youth should lobby to make meaningful because if extended as a sop, the allowance will be a pittance because it will have to spread wide and indiscriminately, but if drafted intelligently and with the interests of those genuinely interested to find employment, it can supplement the continuing efforts to equip Sikkim’s unemployed young with more employable skills.
And while on the topic of unemployment, employability and aspirations, it will be worthwhile for Sikkim and its people to also deliberate over the continuing obsession for government jobs. Government employment, with its job security, absence of accountability and lavish salaries, is understandably aspired for by the unemployed; but it is beyond comprehension how employment anywhere is not even considered an employed status in Sikkim. People employed in the private sector can continue to secure ‘employment identity card’ attesting to their unemployed status! While one may argue that remunerations in the still nascent private sector are rather low, it still does not explain why it is not considered employment. Attempts were made to make this system of “employment identity cards’ more representative of actual employment status during such schemes as the CMSES, but these have met with only limited success. Issues like these will also be need to be resolved when the unemployment allowance regime is brought into play. And then there is the still largely unaddressed situation under which attempts to inspire the youth towards self employment and private job markets continue to meet with only limited success. Sikkim needs to collectively address this issue and take the opportunity opened by the offer of unemployment allowance to address employment and its aspirations…