25 January 2004	Sunday	02 Zilhaj 1424

PESHAWAR: With the provincial public and private sectors hardly capable on their own of absorbing the increasing number of unemployed youth, the emerging market in Afghanistan and the reconstruction activities there are likely to have a positive impact on trade and industry in the Frontier and provide a ray of hope for the growing but idle workforce.

Interviews with officials and private businessmen reveal that thousands of graduates and post-graduates have swelled the already alarmingly high number of unemployed youth in the NWFP due mainly to the inability of the public and private sectors to absorb of the jobless.

The increase in non-governmental organizations and self- employment in the form of small businesses like coaching classes, net cafes, computer training centres, poultry farms, etc., have become a temporary source of comfort for some. But on the whole, the issue of unemployment has worsened during the past one decade, with the private sector failing to expand and the provincial government - the biggest of all employer's in the province - exercising stricter employment policies to control the increasing size of its establishment.

With a total of some 282,000 employees in at different departments and local government institutions, the incumbent NWFP government, like its predecessors, is continuing with the 10-year-old policy of refraining from fresh recruitment on a permanent basis in an effort to control its annual pension bill which is growing at an alarming rate.

The fact that the province will need Rs10 billion every year to meet its pension bill requirements after a period of 15 years when the appointees of the mid-1980s will start getting retired, the provincial government is constrained to make appointments on contract basis, and that too only in the education and health departments where foreign donors have been making investments in the last few years.

The police department and the subordinate judiciary are other exceptions where contractual appointments have been made to cater for the increasing requirements of maintaining law and order and ensuring quicker dispensation of justice.

Thousands of posts, that fell vacant over the years following the retirement of provincial government employees were abolished in the mid-1990s to avoid fresh recruitment in the face of the government's inability to cater for an expanded establishment.

Despite public announcements to lift the old ban on fresh appointments, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal-led government in the province has not been able to do so due to the increasingpressure from the World Bank, which is financing the three-year Provincial Reforms Programme.

In its budget for the current financial year the government had announced its intention to recruit 9,000 teachers against posts to be created under the World Bank funded programme. Now, after the donor agency opposed the recruitment of so many teachers, the government is considering reducing the number of teachers' posts to around 4,500, of which some 1,500 would be filled from the pool of surplus employees, said a source.

"The public sector's role in employment generation is shrinking as the government is disinvesting wherever it can to control its administrative costs," said a senior officer of the provincial government.

Jamshed Sawal, former president of the Sarhad Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said that increasing business opportunities in the emerging Afghan markets, reconstruction works in the war-torn country, declining mark-up rate on bank loans and greater liquidity available with the banks and financial institutions in Pakistan appeared to be some of the factors which could help arrest the issue of unemployment in the NWFP.

The notion that Afghanistan is providing job opportunities to the people of NWFP gains validity from recent remarks made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Mr Karzai said that between 30,000 and 40,000 Pakistanis, mostly skilled labour were engaged in reconstruction and rehabilitation activities inside Afghanistan.

The officially compiled data of the provincial industries department shows that the agriculture sector followed by the services sector are the main employment providers from among the sub-sectors of the feeble private sector of the province.

Mr Sawal says employment situation in the province will improve once the industrial wheel of the province gains momentum by exploiting to its advantage the increasing business opportunities in Afghanistan and extracting benefits from the greater liquidity available against lower mark-up rate being offered by banks in Pakistan.

A recently conducted survey reflected that the private sector employed between 250,000 and 300,000 employees, of which 42 per cent are employed by the agriculture and forest sectors followed by 38 per cent in the services sector, 14 per cent in the construction sector, 0.17 per cent in mining and quarrying, 2.31 per cent in sectors graded as 'others', and 2.7 per cent in the manufacturing sector.

An officer of the industries department, expressed the hope that employment generation in the industrial sector would pick up if even the existing operational units started working to capacity. "Sixty per cent of the total number of operational units are operating below capacity," according to an official document, which adds that out of a total of 1,970 small and medium manufacturing units registered with the government, some 642 are closed, rendering a large workforce jobless.

"The unemployment issue has also much to do with the culture as people don't want their children to become industrial workers. As a result local industrialists have to rely for their labour force on Punjab."