Unemployment and youth of Chitral

Prof. Rahmat Karim Baig

In size of population, Chitral has around half a million population much less than Dir or Bajaur, but higher than certain other districts such as Kohistan. However, in terms of education, Chitral stands second or third in the province; hence the number of educated youth in Chitral is much higher than other districts.

But very few of the educated youth get government or private sector jobs and a large number of them are jobless. This is the direct threshold to tension because one has to survive in the current situation of economic depression. The same could occur in all other districts of the province.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has a very long border with Afghanistan, right from south Waziristan  up to the bottom of Pamir in the north so it is a very risky situation and the border districts of this province have to be kept under active vigilance but the unrest among the jobless youth could lead to certain complications like smuggling, drug trafficking etc. This may create further complications in a fragile border zone so there should be job opportunities for all the border districts such as south Waziristan, north Waziristan, Kurram, Khyber, Mohmand, Bajaur, Dir lower and upper and Chitral lower and upper.

There might be hundreds of thousands of jobless youth from these districts who need to be kept satisfied by measures such as making arrangements to send them to the rich countries in the Middle East after giving them training in skills. This might mitigate the tension among the youth.

There is another alternative to deal with this grim aspect of unemployment. I would like to request the Corps Commander of Peshawar to get a list of all the jobless Bs, Msc, MA  qualified youth district wise and arrange to attach them to temporary jobs in various branches of the Frontier Corps with a view to train them in agriculture and horticulture from its huge defense budget and assign them tasks in various districts and pay them subsistence allowance and this will brighten the image of the armed forces in the eyes of the jobless youth and their families leading to positive results which will be beneficial for the law and order situation in the province in quite short time. Their budget will not suffer if some luxury pursuits are waived for the cause of peaceful atmosphere in the province.