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-The Economic Times
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Six years after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh first urged India Inc to pro-actively offer employment to the less privileged sections of society, the government has not been able to walk the talk. A special recruitment drive initiated by it has failed to meet targets. Under the government's affirmative drive launched in 2008 and focused purely on offering jobs to candidates from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and the disabled categories, 47,000 vacancies have been filled out of a target of 75,500.
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A cabinet note taking stock has been very critical of ministries' performance, though the deadline was extended twice. The ministries that largely failed to meet targets include the Railways, defence, human resources development, home, finance, health, mines, urban development and petroleum. Worse, many ministries have not sent any progress reports despite repeated reminders. While a dozen ministries have cited problems of finding suitable candidates to explain their failure in filling the vacancies, about ten departments, including the President's secretariat, have not furnished any reasons at all. No comments were received from around 45 departments.
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In January last year, the cabinet 're-launched the drive' realising the need to first impart skill sets and education. It issued a diktat for an institutional mechanism to reskill these people. But the Department of Personnel and Training and the ministries of tribal affairs and social justice and empowerment put paid to the idea saying schemes for coaching reserved category youth for competitive exams were already in place. Now, the government plans to devise schemes to bridge the gap between educational qualifications and job market requirements by offering under-privileged youth finishing school-type training on soft skills such as coping with interviews and speaking English. 
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