JAMMU, Mar 07: PDP MLA Waheed Para on Saturday said J&K EDI has been pushed into near dormancy.
Para said " J&K has one of the finest institutions dedicated to nurturing entrepreneurship the Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI). Yet, over the past few years, this institution has been pushed into near dormancy. The question that naturally arises is: why has the #YUWA program not been entrusted to EDI?
The YUWA scheme is a ₹2700 crore initiative that promised to create 1,37,000 entrepreneurship opportunities. But where are these enterprises today? Not a single genuinely new venture appears to have emerged under the scheme. Instead, existing startups seem to have been counted to inflate the numbers. Rather than building a real ecosystem for entrepreneurs, the program has largely been reduced to distributing short-term loans. Even the vague survey for the scheme was conducted by employees as formality under the supervision of the Labour Department raising further questions about the credibility and methodology of the data, even if one assumes the numbers are correct.
What is even more puzzling is that despite having EDI a dedicated entrepreneurship institution with a proven track record the government chose to appoint IIM, primarily an academic institution, as the nodal agency for the program. If the goal is truly to build entrepreneurs and not just circulate loan figures, then the government must answer a simple question: why not restore the responsibility for startups and programs like YUWA to EDI, an institution that has previously demonstrated far better performance, credibility, and transparency?"
JK, deserves genuine entrepreneurship development not just statistics to address the increasing challenges of unemployment
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