In a big boost to the Congress government led by Kamal Nath in Madhya Pradesh, a survey conducted by Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) has indicated that unemployment has fallen rapidly in the state and jobs have been created since the last 9 months.
CMIE is a Mumbai based business information company. It has said that unemployment rate was 7% in the month of December 2018 in the state and as of September 2019, it has reduced to 4.2%. In contrast, the unemployment in the country as of October 2019 is 8.1%.
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Encouraged by this report, the government has said that it has concentrated on not just self-employment generation but also invested in skill development that has paid off.
A political slugfest has broken out as the opposition BJP has questioned the credibility of the survey and asked for the details of all those industries and names of those individuals who have been given a job. They have also attributed this to the Union Government’s skill development programs.
This has come at a time when the state government has organized the Madhya Pradesh magnificent investors summit in Indore on 18th October.
As the nation faces an economic slow down and has to embrace structural changes, there is no better time than now to invest in skill development and make the population ‘employable’ rather than ‘unemployable’.
Shivangi Gautam, a professional involved with the Edu-Tech sector believes that the government should do more. She calls for investments in the field of vocational training and up gradation of soft skills that candidates often do not possess. She says ,”Lack of Computer literacy and English comprehension is a major deterrence to those who seek to hire freshers and hence the government and other stake holders have to invest into these oft ignored soft skills”. She also believes that the government has to move away from just attracting heavy industries and also seek to create jobs in MSME sector and those that are of cultural importance even as MP boasts of many UNESCO world heritage sites and Geographically Indicated goods such as the Chanderi silk.