‘Dignity of labor, respect for any job starts with parents’
DIMAPUR, MAY 13 : The bare fact that the Nagaland government today is “not prepared to employ each and everyone in the government sector” and that no variety of work was beneath one’s dignity, should be “discussed in the family” by every Naga parent.
The context of that statement, by a local legislator, was this: for a task that requires only one LDA, Nagaland has 10 LDAs employed while ‘everybody is sitting at home and drawing salaries.’
This message was shared by the parliamentary secretary for Irrigation and Flood Control N Jacob Zhimomi at the inaugural session of the 23rd biennial general conference of the Diphupar Naga Students’ Union at Dimapur on Friday.
The fascination of every Naga parent and student for government jobs was the context of his statement. While not blaming anyone, his reasoning was that the parents should be the first ones to understand the “reality of the unemployment problem” in Nagaland.
“Today the state government is facing a problem. We are not prepared to employ each and everyone in the government sector. We are suffering. It is not easy because we don’t have any industries. So that makes the state government as the only employer,” he said.
Against said context again, Zhimomi explained, parents and students should understand how the state of Nagaland was born. “Our state is not like any other state in the country. Nagaland was created out of a political arrangement.
And one of the agreements of that arrangement was that the central government will provide as grant-in-aid because we don’t have resources of our own. And today we are surviving on that grant-in-aid (from the centre),” the legislator said.
To illustrate the relation between “unemployment” and the grant-in-aid from New Delhi, Zhimomi stripped the aid package from the centre to Rs 100:
“Out of this Rs 100, we are supposed to use Rs 30 to pay the salary of the employees and use the rest Rs 70 for development. But what we have today is its complete reversal. We are using Rs 70 for salaries and the remaining Rs 30 for development (activities). This is because of excess employment. And excess employment is because of political pressure, which in turn is caused by public pressure. We are all involved in it.”
Hence Zhimomi’s equation: “For a task that could be completed by one LDA, we have ten LDAs employed. Everybody is sitting at home and drawing salaries. Who is going to change the system?” Zhimomi asked the audience of students, student leaders, and parents.
The bare facts, he said, ought to be understood and discussed in every Naga family. “Merely having a graduate or master’s degree will not get you a job. But if you have the skills required by the department (in concern), then nobody can stop you.”