Dastak: Ambitious Youth engagement program rolled out at Shopian

SHOPIAN, MAY 18, 2021: The District Administration Shopian has rolled out ‘Dastak’ first of its kind youth engagement program for providing sustainable livelihood through self-employment to unemployed youth of the district.

The ambitious program envisioned by the District Development Commissioner (DDC) Shopian, Sachin Kumar Vaishya targets to provide self-employment avenues in various sectors like services, transport and manufacturing to over 2000 unemployed youth of the district during the first year of its implementation.

The program is pivoted on the idea that the Central and UT government is providing job avenues to unemployed youth through a spectrum of self-employment schemes involving crores of funds.

But owing to lack of adequate awareness among youth about such schemes, lack of proper verification by field agencies and absence of a single window platform for providing required formalities, most deserving youth are left out. Failure to achieve desired objectives under these schemes leaves our youth in despair and sometimes they get involved in drug abuse.

The Dastak program is strategised in such a way that it will address all the lacunae in implementation of these flagship schemes  to achieve desired objectives. In the first phase of the program all line departments along with Tehsildars shall reach out to the youth at village level and through comprehensive and quality IEC material inform them about self-employment schemes, entailed subsidies, eligibility criteria, requisite formalities and permissible activities under each scheme.

Youth shall be motivated to undertake entrepreneurship/self-employment as job avenues. On spot registration of youth shall be made under various schemes and a process shall be started for sanctioning of their cases.

Meanwhile, teams from line departments along with revenue field staff shall also carry out skill profiling of youth vis-à-vis their qualifications, entrepreneurial skills and areas of interests. Besides potential mapping of villages shall also be done to ensure feasibility and sustainability of the venture.

In the next phase, the properly identified applications under all self-employment schemes shall be processed in a single go. All requisite formalities like revenue documents, detailed projects reports etc shall be provided through a single window system and applicants need not to run from pillar to post to get formalities completed.

A web portal namely Dastak with URL Dastaq.in has also been designed and put into the public sphere by district administration. This portal shall act as a single window for youth to get details about self-employment schemes of all departments. It will serve as an interface between the youth and administration where they can get to know about these flagship schemes, apply for benefits entailed under a particular scheme and know the status of their applications.

Each line department is provided with user ID and password for Dastak portal to login on the portal, download application/s received, get it verified through field agencies and then process it for sanctioning. The onus of facilitating the applicant and getting the formalities completed lies upon the concerned department.

The banks have been advised to stick to only requisite  formalities, sanction cases in one go and release the credit in the shortest possible time. Meanwhile line departments shall release subsidy amount/margin money as per availability of funds.

The line departments as well as banks shall ensure handholding of new entrepreneurs to make their venture a successful one. Each unit established in this way shall be inspected by teams of officers from district administration and it shall be ensured that any problem faced by unitholders is addressed.

The successful entrepreneurs shall be further incentivised and their success stories shall be aired to make others choose self-employment.