"The Employment Exchanges Act should be amended to allow private employment exchanges to provide job placement services to both private and public sector establishments," a mid-term appraisal of the tenth plan said.
The proposal, which the commission argues was due to "poor" coverage of the employment exchanges and 'failure to capture the changes in employment, is slated to come up at the meeting of the national development council, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, on June 27-28.
But according to the same appraisal, the unemployment rate has fallen to 9.11 per cent in 2004-05 from 9.13 per cent in the previous year.
Failing to understand the rationale of the commission to privatise the (employment) exchanges, a senior trade union leader told PTI, "Instead of the getting into the root cause of the disease, they want to suppress the symptoms."
"If privatisation had been the panacea for all the ills, then India should, by now, be free from hunger and poverty since it was the same Congress that embraced privatisation in a big way in the 1990s," said a Left party leader.
Ironically, the mid-term appraisal prescribed relocation of employment exchanges to rural areas, albeit in IT super-highway so that "e-governance mode supports the new initiatives of providing employment guarantee in the backward districts".
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