The Hindu : NSUI's open letter to PM

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 04, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

NSUI's open letter to PM

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, FEB. 3. The National Students' Union of India today submitted an open letter to the Prime Minister seeking reply to a number of issues pertaining to paucity of jobs and increasing unemployment in the country and wondered how the Centre can find "India Shining'' when more and more young and qualified people were remaining jobless or were being forced to accept jobs far below their qualifications.

The NSUI took out a rally up to Parliament Street in which a large number of its activists participated. On being stopped by the police, the activists convened a peaceful meeting and distributed copies of the letter. A number of senior Congress leaders, including All-India Congress Committee general secretaries, Mukul Wasnik and Oscar Fernandes, and AICC secretary, B.K. Hariprasad, also participated in the rally to encourage the student activists who were led by NSUI's all-India president, Ashok Tanwar.

The students said the Centre would be better served if it would stop propagating the false "feel good'' factor as the youth were experiencing a bleak situation as in the last five years there has been a large scale decrease in jobs in the public sector and the private sector has now shown a corresponding rise.

Pointing out that the income elasticity of jobs or the ability to general jobs has declined from 0.52 in the late 1980s to around 0.16 at present, the NSUI said while between 1992 and 1996 there was no qualified jobless person, the number of unemployed as grown since despite the Government promising one crore jobs per year.

Further, the student activists alleged that the situation in higher education and academics was also extremely bleak as in the past few years the Government has not set up any state-funded universities and educational institutions and the education monitoring body, the University Grants Commission, has to the contrary decreased grants to colleges.

Stating that the recent Model Act conceptualised by the UGC actually talks of setting up virtual universities, foreign private universities and asks colleges to generate their own resources through self-finance schemes, the NSUI alleged that the universities such as the Delhi University have seen a freeze on appointments in the past two years which had led to an increase in the workload on the teachers and affected the quality of education.

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