SHOPIAN: The District Administration Shopian has rolled out ‘Dastak’ first of its kind youth engagement program for providing sustainable livelihood through self-employment to unemployed youth of the district.
The ambitious program envisioned by the District Development Commissioner (DDC) Shopian, Sachin Kumar Vaishya targets to provide self-employment avenues in various sectors like services, transport and manufacturing to over 2000 unemployed youth of the district during the first year of its implementation.
The program is pivoted on the idea that the Central and UT government is providing job avenues to unemployed youth through a spectrum of self-employment schemes involving crores of funds.
But owing to lack of adequate awareness among youth about such schemes, lack of proper verification by field agencies and absence of a single window platform for providing required formalities, most deserving youth are left out. Failure to achieve desired objectives under these schemes leaves our youth in despair and sometimes they get involved in drug abuse.
The Dastak program is strategised in such a way that it will address all the lacunae in implementation of these flagship schemes to achieve desired objectives. In the first phase of the program all line departments along with Tehsildars shall reach out to the youth at village level and through comprehensive and quality IEC material inform them about self-employment schemes, entailed subsidies, eligibility criteria, requisite formalities and permissible activities under each scheme.
Youth shall be motivated to undertake entrepreneurship/self-employment as job avenues. On spot registration of youth shall be made under various schemes and a process shall be started for sanctioning of their cases.

KR Desk