However, more importance was expected in linking education and employment by incentivizing human-capital-intensive service sector to help educational investment breed higher returns. With the rate of educated unemployment in urban areas as high as 16 per cent, much higher than that for those with educational level middle or below, depicted by the latest employment-unemployment survey of NSSO (62nd round 2005-06), urban unemployment was expected to get special attention in the line of employment creation in rural areas under NREGA. Modernization of Employment Exchange in public private partnership, however, is a good step ahead in this direction.
A higher emphasis on non-excludable service provisions such as police service is definitely an indirect endeavor towards 'social inclusion'. Secondly, enabling self-employed to participate in NPS and to avail tax benefits is a good move towards 'occupational inclusion'. However, as it is recently revealed by a World Bank study that a diverging gap exists between what people perceive as being poor (captured in 'community poverty lines') and what government estimates by official poverty line, a flat provisioning under National Food Security is not fully exhaustive in an 'inclusive' budget.
Sahana Roy Chowdhury,
Economist,
Monetary Research Project, ICRA Ltd., Kolkata
and
former Research Fellow of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
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