Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi on Friday said that the youth should develop a new mindset for exploring self-employment opportunities.
Ms. Bedi was speaking at the Digital Youth Summit organised by the Department of Information Technology and the ICT Academy at Kamban Kalai Arangam.
Taking strong exception to those criticising the government as failing the youth, especially the graduate engineers without offering them jobs, she said that youth should be job givers instead of waiting in queues outside employment exchanges.
With a higher literary rate, Puducherry should be made digitally literate.
The Lt. Governor pointed out that Bengaluru was getting saturated in the Information Technology sector. Puducherry could be a major IT hub and the Bengaluru of tomorrow, she said and added that creating self-employment projects was the need of the hour. The time had changed and government jobs should not reign supreme in the minds of the youth.
The Union Government was finally strengthening Puducherry financially to succeed in all its efforts. The Government had extended its full support for the budget estimate and a full-fledged budget would be adopted soon, she added.
Chief Minister V. Narayanasamy said the Government was prepared to extend concession for the entrepreneurs in the IT sector.
The government would provide land to the entrepreneurs coming forward to establish their units in Puducherry.
Taking a dig at comments made by the AIADMK MLA A. Anbalagan that the Government had failed to provide jobs to graduate engineers, he said that the Government did not have any magic wand to tackle the problem of unemployment.
The present Government was only three months old in power and we have already taken steps to establish a software technology park in the city through the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model.
Mr. Narayanasamy said the government had drawn up a plan to hold job fairs twice a year as the youth in Puducherry accounted for 43 per cent of the total population. The government will act as a facilitator he said and added that there was a plan to establish 61 Common Service Centres across the UT.
“Our aim is to introduce e-governance and paperless administration as per the directions of the Centre. The Centre had asked Puducherry government to earmark 3 per cent of the budget allocation for e-governance facility, which was being adhered to,” he said.
