Thiruvananthapuram: After the LDF government has announced five major missions, the Planning Board has mooted the setting up of yet another mission under the Chief Minister a Comprehensive Mission on Employment Generation to take timely decisions on employment generation.
The Board has recommended a three-tier structure for the mission: a State Mission Unit, District/Corporation Mission Units, and a pool of empanelled, accredited resource personnel/agencies at the grass root level to provide end to end services. The Mission will be mandated to extend critical support in areas, particularly skill and competency development, business planning, financial linkages, market linkages, technology and infrastructure support, mentoring, compliances support and IT services. "It will be an interface between government schemes, service providers and the potential entrepreneurs," a Planning Board source said.
The recommendation was made by the Task Force on Comprehensive Plan for Self Employment. The Task Force comprised senior officials from the government, banks, industry and domain experts. Eight subcommittees also were constituted under the Task Force to look into various aspects of the self-employment scenario.
"The primary shortcoming of the existing self employment schemes and programmes lies in their implementation. The programmes do not always reach targeted beneficiaries," the Board source said. In addition to that, the Task Force also found that multiple overlapping initiatives of various agencies needed co-ordination at the state level. "Most of the schemes are envisaged with funding support for piecemeal activities. Many vital support services including skill development and business planning are not part of many of these on-going schemes," the source said.
The Mission will also tap into the start-up wave that is spreading across the state. "The engineering colleges in the state have become hotbeds of entrepreneurship. But a rough assessment has revealed that most of these start-ups flounder within a year. There is a need to mentor these budding enterprises, a responsibility that the Mission could take up," the source said.
