BHUBANESWAR: The State Government on Thursday announced yet another scheme ‘Mukhyamantri Nijukti Srusti Yojana’ (Chief Minister’s Employment Generation Scheme) to generate employment opportunities for unemployed youths as per the promise made by the BJD in its election manifesto.
The decision was taken at a high-level meeting presided over by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik at the State Secretariat here.
Under the new scheme, a target has been fixed to provide skill development training to 11 lakh men and women in next five years. Priority will be given to youths from rural areas.
Official sources said 9.35 lakh youths from rural areas and 1.7 lakh from urban areas will be provided training during the period. The scheme will be monitored and supervised by the Employment Training and Technical Education (ET&TE) Department. The Chief Minister will review implementation of the scheme every two months, while the Chief Secretary would do so on a monthly basis. The District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) will be the nodal agency for implementation of the scheme at the district level.
The BJD election manifesto had announced that the State Government will introduce a Chief Minister’s Employment Generation Scheme under which a minimum of 150 youths from each gram panchayat will be provided skill upgradation training and the subsequent loan and subsidy linkage.
The Government’s decision has, however, come in for sharp criticism from the Congress. The party members claimed that BJD failed to implement several promises made in earlier manifestoes.
“The BJD had promised to create employment opportunities for 20 lakh youths, but unemployment has gone up in the State,” Leader of the Opposition, Narsingh Mishra, said. Mishra alleged that having cheated people for the last 14 years, the State Government is making a fresh attempt to befool the people of Odisha. “If one goes through the BJD manifestoes from 1998 onwards, it can be seen that many of the promises have remained unfulfilled,” he said.
Declaration of Odisha as a special category State, free electricity to farmers announced in 2009 manifesto, providing irrigation facilities for 35 per cent cultivable land and establishment of Western Odisha Development Council (WODC) headquarters in Western region of the State are yet to be implemented, he said and added that the employment scheme announced today will also be a flop.