Addressing a summit on livelihood security, the President Pranab Mukherjee has given an insight into what India shall have to be in 2020. With average age of 29 which is eight years younger than average age in the US and China, by 2020 India is likely to be the biggest supplier of labour force to the world. As such, it is of utmost importance that we have the largest number of skilled labour, at least 500 million of them. Thus there is immensely huge task before the nation to create infrastructure that would respond to our needs and requirements.
Obviously, employment is the strongest tool of eradicating the curse of poverty. But employment has to be diversified. The President thinks that our youth shall have to move to non-farm sector in order to find more avenues of employment. Means of livelihood have to be provided to large population. It is a strange diktat of history that while we have in our country 17 per cent of world population, we have only 2.4 per cent of geographical area. This shows that we have great pressure of devising new means and sources of livelihood for out vast population. It is true that 60 per cent of our population was poor six decades ago and this graph has come down to 30 per cent. But we cannot rest content with that. We have to make great efforts in not reducing but eliminating poverty from our country.
We have over employment in farm sector and we have reached the optimum. Therefore the shift has to be on non-farm jobs. Its employment scope has to be explored and exploited. The President is right in suggesting that freeze should be imposed on fresh farm jobs sector. Food processing sector provides a window for generating jobs in rural areas and small townships. Developing this sunrise sector calls for greater investment in infrastructure like cold chains, handling, packaging and transportation.
Imperatives of fast changing life and induction of technological and scientific temper into contemporary society will have bearing on traditional ways of framing and marketing. We in India have to keep pace with the changing world and life style. Our living, and eating habits are undergoing a big change and the industry has to keep pace with this change.
It is just that farm jobs have reached the saturation point and it forces us to consider shifting of priorities. The President, a man of great futuristic vision, has very candidly placed the ground situation before the society and it is now for the planners to adjust according to needs and requirements. A vast unorganized sector of our population has to go through a change and it falls in the realm of Corporate Social Change (CSC). Various schemes or yojna(s) floated by the Central Government have been devised with this objective in mind. For example speaking about ‘Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana’, ‘Financial Inclusion’ and ‘Digital India’, the President expressed confidence that these determined efforts would lead to socio-economic benefits including greater livelihood opportunities. In final analysis the President very rightly desired the industry to create a mechanism for income opportunities and capacity building through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
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