Shah Zain
India is a young country. Youth is its asset. Our young population is making the nation proud in every sector and in every field, inside and outside the country. It has also been the endeavour of the government to channelize its young people towards overall national development and progress. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has always maintained that the development of youth was central to his government’s policy, which is focused on four ‘E’s — education, employment, entrepreneurship and excellence.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has constantly sought to create new avenues and opportunities for livelihood, government jobs and income for the youth. Simultaneously, the Central government is working on multiple fronts to create more and more jobs for the young citizens of the country.
Rozgar Mela For The Youth
It is in this context that the Prime Minister launched the Rozgar Mela on the weekend (October 22) in New Delhi. Rozgar Mela is being anchored to the employment and self-employment campaigns in the country that are going on for the last 8 years. Through this campaign, recruitment to around 10 lakh people would be offered in various departments and sectors of the central government. During the ceremony, appointment letters were handed over to 75,000 newly inducted appointees keeping in mind the 75 years of India’s independence and the nation celebrating the year as Azadi ka Amrit Mahautsav. All these young new recruits in the government will have the opportunity to contribute in the process of national building over the next 25 years to realise the dream of Century India in 2047.
Tapping The Workforce Potential For Economic Growth
India has a talent and skill in abundance. In the immediate future, India will be a talent powerhouse and the largest contributor to the global workforce. There is no denying the extraordinary opportunity. According to a CII report, if India’s demographic dividend is productively employed, growth prospects will brighten, helping it to leapfrog its GDP, as per the vision of the Prime Minister and aspirations of its people.
Population wise, India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2023, as per the report released by the UN World Population Prospects 2022 in July. Earlier projections had estimated that the milestone will occur in 2027. The median age of the Indian population is less than 29 years. In 2020, India had about 67% of its population in the working age group of 15-64 years – the segment known as the demographic dividend.
Tapping the workforce potential for economic growth is closely tied to access to healthcare, quality education, productive employment opportunities and more. While India does have a demographic advantage, the government of the day is making all possible efforts to ensure that the working-age population of the country is earning dignified living. In this regard, we have seen massive skilling initiatives happening over the past decade in India. The need of the time is to keep the skill of the young population at pace with the population growth. Since 2014, we have seen a lot of progress being made in this front and work of skilling, reskilling, and job creation has happened tremendously in the country.
The Growth Engine
In July this year, the Prime Minister said while addressing the 42nd Convocation of Anna University in Chennai that the whole world was looking at India’s youth with hope. “Because you are the growth engine of the country and Indi is the world’s growth engine. My faith is in the younger generation, the modern generation, the modern generation. They will work out all problems like lions – these words of Swami Vivekanand as the entire world today looks to the youth of India,” the Prime Minister has said.
So the mantra of youth empowerment is not only to provide them jobs or a source of livelihood, but also to make them custodians of the nation’s progress and development. For realising this goal, the work efficiency in government offices needs to be doubly enhanced. It is also part of this vision on which rests the rationale of the Rozgar Mela, which was explained by the Prime minister himself: “We decided that a tradition of giving appointment letters in one go should be started so that a collective temperament of completing projects in a time-bound way develops in departments.”
India’s Demographic Dividend – A Blessing
In his welcome address at the Rozgar Mela at ISTM in Delhi, Union Minister for DoPT, Dr Jitendra Singh said the target of giving 10 lakh government jobs to youth will be met in next few months. He said, as per the directions of the Prime Minister, all Ministries and Departments are working towards filling up existing vacancies against sanctioned posts in Mission Mode.
Right from the beginning, the Prime Minister has given highest priority to the issues and concerns related to youth. In his Independence Day address of 2015, the Prime Minister gave a call for “StartUp India StandUp India”, which soon turned into a countrywide movement. The result of this is that now the number of StartUps in India has gone up from 300 to 400 in 2014 to more than 75,000 today and India ranks third in the world in StartUp ecosystem.
India’s demographic dividend is surely going to become a blessing for the country in the wake of skilled workforce and creation of sufficient jobs for which the government is working with vigour. As Prime Minister Modi said in Rajya Sabha once, “The more emphasis we put on India’s youth power and the more opportunities we will give them, I understand that they will become a strong foundation for the bright future of our country.”
BLURB
In his Independence Day address of 2015, the Prime Minister gave a call for ‘StartUp India StandUp India’, which soon turned into a countrywide movement. The result is that the number of StartUps in India has gone up from 300 to 400 in 2014 to more than 75,000 today and India ranks third in the world in StartUp ecosystem
