Economic empowerment

In the face of the country’s economy being bestowed focused attention by analysts both globally and nationally, steadily witnessing the much disturbing slowdown due to many factors resulting in the verdict of the annual rate of increase of gross domestic product at 4.8 percent over earlier periods against the target of more than 7.5 percent, the task of empowering the land’s underemployed sections in the population needs to be pursued on a war-footing. The measure of creating skill enhancing centres, particularly for the educated youth and women engaged on various traditional trades to facilitate substantial rise in their income, under the aegis of the Central Government and some State Governments, including Karnataka is a good beginning, reminding one of the idiom well-begun is half-done. If the often expressed rating of India’s engineering graduates as far below suitability for jobs in industrial establishments needs to be raised, the graduates are to be diverted from taking up vulnerable jobs with uncertain incomes and their years of training facilitated to blossom into creating a vibrant workforce.

Resources have been spent over years on a colossal scale in establishing institutions of education in engineering, management and commerce streams across the country, steadily swelling the backlog of unemployed educated youth. The advisory sourced to some achievers in industry points to creating conditions in which the workforce biding time seeking employment in city environs are enabled to use their knowledge on the farms, transforming agriculture to a rewarding calling.

Most of the problems bugging the land’s people having their origins in blunders committed due to lack of vision on the part of policy-makers in successive Governments, timely introspection and will to do course correction may help in taking the economy on track. Addressing the problems by both stakeholders and stockholders, particularly plastic menace, encroaching water bodies, lawlessness, garbage disposal, pollution reduction and so on seem to be going on in fits and jerks, compounded by steady expansion of the country’s population, to address which issue nobody has any pragmatic plan.

According to the recently published Global Social Mobility Report of World Economic Forum, more than three-fourths of India’s workforce is engaged on vulnerable employment without minimum wage, social security and proper working conditions, urging nations, including India, to act on economic empowerment of workforce, including women marked by low labour participation rate. India’s corporates have their task cut out in regulating the overuse of resource-guzzling technologies and adopting resource-conserving ones.