PESHAWAR, Sept 6: Most of the youth inducted into various NWFP government departments under the National Internship Programme (NIP) are unhappy for being assigned duties contrary to their academic qualifications, it is learnt.

A group of interns in the establishment, administration, local government and rural development (LG&RD), schools and literacy and finance departments complained that most of them were graduates in science and information technology but they were doing only clerical jobs. They said they had joined the programme with the hope that it would contribute to the career progression in their fields.

A software engineer working in the LG&RD department said he and 12 other interns, mostly IT professionals, had been placed there but none of them was doing a job relevant to their qualification.

“Before joining the NIP, I was working for a private software house and designing programmes for corporate organisations. I thought I would learn and acquire advance skills that could help me in my career and obtaining a better job. But here my utility is not more than that of a key punch operator,” he deplored.

According to him, most of his batch-mates having technical education did not find work according to their qualification, he said, adding that it was also causing wastage of resources. Some interns complained about the attitude of government employees, saying that most of the time they were discouraged and not recognised as part of the department.

They said 3,400 interns in the province had not been paid stipend since their induction.

An official conceded that regular employees assigned petty tasks to most of the interns and considered them to be outsiders.

However, the employees working as mentors of the trainees are also not satisfied with their performance.

One of the mentors in the finance department said the young graduates did not take their tasks seriously and most of them attended the offices hardly for two hours a day.

An official in the establishment department, the focal agency for the NIP at the provincial level, said the trainees were placed keeping in view their qualification.

He said the interns in the agriculture department, Nuclear Institute of Food and Agriculture, animal husbandry, information technology directorate and other technical departments were performing very well.

The official said the skills of technical graduates working in non-technical departments could be utilised appropriately if the mentors wanted to do so.