Jobs outnumber graduates in Karnataka

Karnataka has more jobs than the number of graduates it produces annually, Deputy Chief Minister C N Ashwath Narayan said on Friday.

“Karnataka is a state where there are 106% employment opportunities in the formal sector,” Narayan, who is the minister for IT/BT, higher education and medical education, said. “If there are 5.5 lakh students graduating, there are 5.75 lakh opportunities,” he added. He was unveiling the government’s plans for a one-stop-shop platform to bring all youth and student services under one roof.

Narayan’s claim comes at a time when the Congress is attacking his party, the BJP, on unemployment and job losses.

The DCM said the government had brought together various departments offering youth and student services on a single platform. “This will be launched on the occasion of Swami Vivekananda’s birth anniversary on January 12,” he said. This platform is aimed at providing all the information by synchronising everything youth and students need,” he said.

The platform will provide information on various schemes and facilities provided by multiple government departments, information on various financial services provided by banks (loans etc), psychometric analysis of each student and career counselling.

Narayan said a Youth Empowerment Centre (YEC) will be established at every level - high school, pre-university college, degree college and polytechnics. To start with, one YEC will be established in every district. “Normally, a student starts looking for job opportunities after studies, but why can’t one do that during studies? We’ve realised that the problem, all along, was that of communication gap.”

The YEC in each district will function under a committee chaired by the deputy commissioner. It will disseminate information on job opportunities, scholarships, education loans and so on. “We want to have a YEC in every school so that we catch students young,” Narayan said.

Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa will symbolically inaugurate the Bengaluru YEC on January 12. The event will be held at the Kanteerava indoor stadium. On the occasion, free laptops will be given to about one lakh first-year students of government first grade colleges at a cost of about Rs 300 crore.

Asked about the lack of permanent teaching faculty at government colleges, Narayan said there were some 15,000 guest lecturers and even their salaries were delayed. “There’s some problem in the treasury’s migration to the new Khajane-2 software. We’ve decided to give them salaries manually for now,” he said.