J&K: Aspiring Entrepreneurs face miseries of Corruption, needless Documentation

14/07/2012

Recently, I heard the Chief Minister
Jenab Omar Abdullah while ad
dressing a public gathering saying that the state government cannot afford to provide government job to every educated youth of the state therefore they should strive towards setting up their own entrepreneurs and provide employment to others also. Well, the suggestion of the young Chief Minister is very honest and must be taken into a right perspective because obviously the state government cannot provide job in government sector to every educated youth due to limited resources and funds. Thought there is a critical need of manpower in almost every department of the state government be it, education, Health, Police, Transportation, Traffic, Municipalities, Clerical Staff, Power Department, Revenue Department, Public Works, Public Health Engineering, Fire safety department or Law or Judiciary. But again, without any confrontation and argument we accept the advice of Jenab Omar Abdullah. Now for establishing any new enterprise the foremost requirement is the capital, and we all know in our state the banks are so reluctant in awarding loans to a new entrepreneur unless and until he is son or the daughter of a known political figure or can afford to pledge property 100 percent more than the required loan amount. The pretext of most of the banks in awarding loan is non-feasibility of the project of the applicant, the bank authorities show utmost reluctance. Anyhow, If an educated youth whose parents can afford to pledge or mortgage their property with the bank will be able to win a loan from the bank and that too after paying the graft to the bank staff. Despite securing a loan from the bank to start an entrepreneurship, the miseries of the aspirant continues. The multi layered bureaucracy makes things even worst, the aspirant needs to register his/her firm or enterprise with the industries department, then he needs to visit almost a dozen other offices and departments of the state government before formally starting his unit. The permission from the Power department, PHE, Pollution Control, Local Body, Sales Tax department, Revenue department and several other department makes this further cumbersome. There is no arrangement of single-window system to facilitate the youth where all these departments have a coordination so that the aspirant faces minimum frantic exercise and unless wastage of energy of the youth, time and money can be saved. In absence of any coordination between these department and casual approach of the state government it makes things almost impossible for the would be entrepreneur.
A male candidate may be using his skills or running here and there can do things in his favors but we can very well guess the trauma a female contender would face in all these unnecessary documentations, with every department and with every officer she needs to submit all documents again and again and every time officers find more and more shortcomings in the documentations unless the files are annexed with the green papers with the photograph of Mahatma Gandhi. Through this medium, I would suggest the young and energetic Chief Minister that, it is very easy to make a suggestion but quite difficult to act on and if he is really serious to provide employment to the youth of the state, he should consider all the above made requests and immediately order for formation of a coordination committee of all the concerned departments so that the aspirants need not to waste their energy, precious time in unnecessary documentation and distributing corruption to the officers but they find a well established platform where they can start their own units without any problem. RAMAN SHARMA, is an RTI activist and can be reached [@] jkrtiact@gmail.com

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