Focus on youth: Congress' MP election manifesto promises 2 lakh jobs, recruitment bill, transparent procedure

Bhopal, Oct 17 (IANS) Aimed to get support from youth, including 22.36 lakh first time voters, the Congress has made several promises for them in its manifesto for the November 17 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, released on Tuesday.

Kamal Nath led MP Congress has promised to fill two lakh vacant posts and promised that at least one lakh job vacancies will be created for youths in rural areas.

In its manifesto, the Congress has mentioned that more than two crore youth are unemployed, and of them, several lakh are skilled and they will be provided jobs through various schemes.

Job-oriented diploma courses related with farming, animal husbandry, and fisheries would be included in school education, it said.

The Congress also said that if it forms the government in Madhya Pradesh, it would allocate a Rs1,000 crore corpus fund for new startups and to encourage skilled youth for entrepreneurship.

The party has attempted to deal with the main issue plaguing the youth for the last few decades -- irregularities in the state government’s recruitment exams, saying that in power, recruitment exams for government jobs would be made transparent.

Kamal Nath has promised that if he comes to power, his government will introduce a new system of selection for the government jobs in the state.

"The Congress is committed to bring transparency in the recruitment system and to make it possible; we will introduce a bill in the state Assembly, which will be called the Madhya Pradesh Recruitment Act. Beside all these, we will also establish a recruitment commission and a separate inquiry commission will also be setup to monitor the irregularities in the system," the Congress 'vachan patra' said.

The multi-layer Vyapam scam, which broke out in 2013, stormed ino the international headlines because of over 50 mysterious deaths. The BJP government led by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan changed the names of the board twice in the past couple years to get rid of its dented image, however, the ghost still remained in the system.

One after another, irregularities kept on surfacing in recruitment exams – in the nursing exams, patwari exams, police constable exams and many more in the past few years, offering a clear indication that merely the name of the board has changed, and the problems still persist.

These multiple scams in recruitment exams for the various departments of the state government, have not just ruined the future of lakhs of youths, it has also dented Madhya Pradesh’s image.

Gauging the sentiment of the people, Kamal Nath has included this particular issue in his election manifesto.

There are at least 31 constituencies in the state where the number of young or first-time voters aged between 18 and 19 years is more than the winning margin in the previous Assembly elections. There are 17 constituencies in the state where the victory margin in the 2018 assembly election was less than one per cent. However, there is no such constituency in this election where the percentage of young or first-time voters is less than 2 per cent of the electorate.

There are 22.2 lakh first time voters in the state, according to the Election Commission’s data.