“Curbing Unemployment in Balochistan”
By Harsa Kakar
Robin Williams used to say that a hungry stomach, an empty pocket, and a broken heart can teach the best lessons of life. However, in Balochistan the case is different. Despite being rich in natural resources, Balochistan stands at a rate of 4% when it comes to unemployment among sister provinces, leaving behind only Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Understandably, the country has been undergoing a crisis and is far from creating more jobs even though the economy seems to be stabilizing now that a new loan credit has been approved. The search for jobs and the inability to find other means to earn make the youth in Balochistan suffer. This lack of employment opportunities has made the youth so desperate that an MPhil graduate finds a nine or 11-scale job sufficient to make both ends meet, irrespective of his hard work and learning years.
Aside from that, youth are eager to offer bribes to secure a job as basic as a clerk just to run their households. This irrational and traditional thought process keeps them from looking for other sources of earning like entrepreneurship that could be more productive for both the province and the country. The above-mentioned facts can be stated from the recently held exams conducted by the Balochistan Public Service Examination (BPSC), for the post of Tehsildar, in which an average of 34007 candidates had applied against 28 posts.
In this context, the question that this paper seeks to address is how to bring the youth out of this unending loop of the urge to earn from a ‘government job’ and the inability to do anything else. The answer to it is, to avoid ‘shortcuts’ and look for other means of earning, which might seem harder for a library student but they are more fruitful with the same amount of hard work. To be clear, entrepreneurship for a student may include earning from freelancing, online businesses, content creation, brand creation, social media marketing, AI handling, software development, etc.
The youngsters who aren’t interested in online earning can explore the local wholesale markets, buy things in demand based on loan credit, sell them, and repay the loan. They can then sell this product online through a specialist’s help to grow their business. It is just a tiny drop in an ocean of the market that is empty of competition. In the same way, an entrepreneur is not only someone who earns digitally, he could also be a goatherd, own a bicycle pump on roadsides, or be a car dealer, it doesn’t make him any less of an entrepreneur.
In this regard, governments in Pakistan have taken certain measures to promote the concept of entrepreneurship among youth starting in 2013 in the form of initiatives like the Prime Minister’s Youth Program and then in recent years, namely the Kaamyaab Jawaan Program, National Vocational and Technical Training Commission (NAVTTC), Pakistan Startup Act, Digital Pakistan Initiative, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority (SMEDA), Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA), Youth Entrepreneurship Scheme (YES), and CM Balochistan’s Youth Skill Development Program is the most recent in the list.
These initiatives have equipped youth with skills like Cybersecurity, Graphic design, Social Media Marketing, AI (Machine and Deep Learning), IT (UI/UX), Enterprise Resource Planning, Industrial Automation, Media production, Network and Cloud Computing, and Agriculture Farm Management in institutes all across the country. However, there certainly are loopholes and limitations as far as the success of these initiatives is concerned.
Moreover, the youth of Balochistan, may not be opting for entrepreneurship as their sole source of income due to the potential obstacles that they fear they might face in the process. Now that is where the government’s major role comes in. That is to ensure safe passage for them to function, involving modest internet access, convenient process of paperwork, tax exemptions in the start, and facilitations wherever possible so that small businesses may flourish and grow in a supportive and friendly ecosystem for entrepreneurship.
To sum it up, youth in Balochistan have the potential to achieve all heights of success with a minor shift in mindset. As soon as they get themselves out of the mindset of achieving a government job and linking it to life’s security, the sooner will they turn towards earning through entrepreneurship and start learning skills to practice it which will help them create more jobs and thus decrease the province’s unemployment rate.
