dehradun

Updated: Apr 20, 2018 22:35 IST

Chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat on Friday asked youths to explore self-employment opportunities instead of searching for jobs, to help the resource-crunched state achieve a fast-paced growth.

“It is time the local youth opted for self-employment opportunities and become entrepreneurs and job givers instead of looking for petty jobs outside the state,” Rawat said.

“That is the strategy that can give a push for the hill state’s fast-paced growth,” he said while inaugurating ‘Dev Bhumi Dialogue’ -- a day-long interactive session with about 500 youths of Uttarakhand.

The chief minister also stressed the need to make the state economically independent.

“That was the dream envisioned by the activists of the mid-1990s agitation for a separate state and others--- writers, poets, singers and artists, who had been associated with it,” Rawat said.

“The youth -- those sitting before me and also across the state alone have the potential to translate that dream into reality.”

The dream could only be realised if the local youths started thinking in terms of becoming entrepreneurs instead of looking for jobs.

Referring to his recent visit to Thailand, Rawat said he got to know in that country that only one percent of its people were unemployed.

“I was told that the reason behind the negligible unemployment in Thailand was that there was hardly any demand for jobs in that country,” Rawat said.

“Instead, the people there believe in setting up their own businesses, so they could also become productive for their country.”

The CM’s interaction with the youths is the first in a series of such “future monthly interactions that would be held with all sections of society including farmers, women and industrialists etc”.

He urged the participating youths to feel free to share all their suggestions and queries with experts who “have been roped in” to speak during different sessions of the Dev-Bhumi Dialogue because they all were apolitical.

“The experts who will deliver talks are social scientists, representatives of non-governmental organisations active in various sectors and bureaucrats,” Rawat said. “All such people speak what is true or nearer to the truth, unlike politicians, who many a time, tend to beat about the bush owing to various compulsions.”

The chief minister’s media advisor Ramesh Bhatt while delivering a talk credited Rawat with coming up with an idea like Dev Bhumi Dialogue.

“The chief minister came up with the idea because he genuinely feels that the youths alone can set the development agenda for the state and give it a proper direction,” Bhatt said.

Environmentalist Anil Joshi while speaking on the occasion said Rawat was the first chief minister who came up with the idea of initiating a dialogue with people for policy formulations.

“Such an idea should be welcomed because this is for the first time after the state’s formation some 18 years ago that a dispensation has shown the sensitivity to follow a bottom-up approach in implementing the state’s development agenda,” he said.

Bhatt said the youth elsewhere in the state would also be “benefited by the interactive session as it is being telecast live in all 95 blocks across the state”.