Number of unemployed to touch 1 crore in Odisha: Congress

Bhubaneswar: Odisha is staring at a demographic disaster as the number of unemployed in the state is expected to touch 1 crore, said Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Niranjan Patnaik on Thursday.

Giving a grim picture of employment in the state, Patnaik said Odisha now stands at around 7th position in the 10 high unemployment rate states of India.

Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) with Bombay Stock Exchange prepared data of unemployment in Odisha, which says that, unemployment rate in the state is constantly raising, informed the PCC president.

He said just one year back in February 2018, the unemployment rate in Odisha increased to 7 percent from 5.5 percent in January.

Also in March last year, it again increased to 7.8 percent. Another disturbing fact revealed in this report is that higher the education level worse is the unemployment rate in the State, he added.

“The CMIE-BSE data, further reveals that the unemployment rate in category of ‘graduate or and above’ is high at over 13 per cent in Odisha; whereas the rate of unemployment is around 9 per cent in the category of education level of ‘10th – 12th standard’. As per recent data, the counts of higher educated unemployed in Odisha have crossed 22 lakh and the counts of uneducated unemployed touched around 80 lakh. Approximately, over 1 crore in Odisha have no jobs,” said Patnaik.

He said in the past 19 years, the BJD govt has done nothing for employment generation in Odisha.

“There are no opportunities for our youth. No new industries have come up and the existing ones have been shut down by the worthless Naveen Patnaik government,” alleged Patnaik.

He said youths from various districts are migrating to other states and cities and even there they don’t get jobs as per their qualifications.