‘Yuvasree Prakalpa’ in West Bengal

Bhaskar Majumder

The Government of WestBengal announced in early August 2025 the scheme now termed Yuvasree Prakalpathat was launched more than a decade ago in October 2013 as Yuva Utsaha Prakalpato enhance the employability of the unemployed youth in West Bengal, for the youth in the age range between 18 and 45. The unemployment assistance was meant for the job-seekers registered with the Employment Bank. The scheme is managed by the Labour Department, Government of West Bengal. The allowance is provided to the first one lakh job-seekers registered with the Employment Bank.

Each plan carries some programmes and each programme carries some schemes. So, the Yuvasree Prakalpa (project) is a natural flow in the stream of projects. It needs dissection, however.

First, the Government of West Bengal has been honest in acknowledging the existence of enormous unemployment in West Bengal. Second, the Government is honest in supporting the youth above age 18 through providing unemployment allowance @ Rs. 1500 per head per month. Third, the Government is honest that it will support only those who are permanent residents of West Bengal. The Government is honest that it did not discriminate in providing benefits across gender-religion-caste. So far, so good. Now questions come as follows:

Some General Questions
*    An adult physically active mentally unchallenged individual fixed at the rate of Rs. 1500 per head per month earned (actually not earned) may demoralise him/her in the eyes of the rest of the society.
*    It is not obvious if this transfer income (like pocket money from father to son/daughter) will go to support the budget of the household or will go elsewhere.
*    What happens if the individual is a migrant and fails to stand on the queue to arrange all necessary documents as required to collect the dole?
*    It is not clear if the villages are also included for most of the youth in the villages may not have desired formal education and/or may not be on the wait-list of Employment Bank.
*    Information gap, catch/connections, network that facilitate in such cases are vague in the Prakalpa.

Compulsions
The compulsion to stay in power requires announcement of many such Prakalpas [Projects]. Market-excluded, the youth may stand on the queue to get survival support from the benevolent government. Money is more important than ethics; so, begging is accepted when the government is the giver that people elected.

Practical Problems
What the government pledges to give is really money collected from the economically active people through taxes and/or through some agencies/institutions to give back a part of it to the people–the sub-set of people are different. A state government like West Bengal does not print money and there is hardly any scope to borrow from the banking system for such specific purposes.

It is really difficult to find out the source that the Government of West Bengal unearthed to collect such huge money for distribution that is not backed by any production of goods and services. This money seen as the unemployment allowance can hardly be seen as investment by either the government or by the youth receiving it. Of course, it is not clear how long the youth will continue to receive and the saving component of it. It may be that the judicious individual may save, say, 25.0 percent of his/her annual unearned allowance, that is, Rs 4,500 per year from Rs 18,000 per year. At this rate, he/she will save Rs 22,500 over a period of five years, ignoring interest income earned at the savings rate in the bank. By any stretch of imagination, this will be inadequate for the youth to open up any income-yielding venture or purchase an income-generating asset for self-use to earn at the end of these five years. I doubt if the individual is going to wait for five years to have such a rosy scenario.

Alternatives for the Youth
All economic answers are political questions–on a narrow canvas, giving a beggar’s bowl in the hand of the youth is a question on electoral politics. Based on this writer’s communications with a number of unemployed graduate individuals in the age ranging from 25 to 35, all male, in the sub-urban areas of Kolkata It was learnt that they were ‘reluctantly willing’ to take the allowance under the YuvasreePrakalpa–‘reluctantly willing’ understood as reflection of absence of choice or alternatives. The individuals were not in a position to readily leave the state of West Bengal for a number of reasons. For example, some of them were accustomed to public life of urban West Bengal, some living safe under the roof of the ancestral house, some in proximity to the ruling political party and all that.

Questions for the Government
Post-Tata episode around the proposed Nano car factory in Singur more than a decade ago that brought this ruling government to power, Tata industrial house may ask for compensation from the government of West Bengal. The imaginary setting up of a steel plant in Salboni for which the Chief Minister visited Spain a few years ago is one question mark–what happened. Most of the plants and factories in the sub-urban areas of West Bengal got shut down or sold out in the past one decade apart from capital flight from West Bengal since many decades for capital was not considered ‘safe’ in West Bengal.

While West Bengal had and has a tradition of success in primary sector and cultural avenues, the nature of regular employment rests mostly on industries. It may not be necessary that this government will have to set up industries but emphasizing on agriculture also needs a type of ‘factory farming’ or multi-cropping to absorb working population. That did not happen. One evidence of that is migration under distress to other states. Migration as such was basically considered as temporary dislocation of the youth who were not much willing to leave West Bengal; they were tied to family-friends-political masters apart from perceived difficulties in living in other states that might be hostile because of language-gap and different culture like food habits and so on. The advisors in Government of West Bengal know all these parameters.

Success in electoral politics is one thing and economic success is another–the latter is different from political manipulative practices. Undoubtedly Yuvasree will fetch more votes and undoubtedly more youth will be victims of degradation-demoralisation. Government may be unconcerned for stunted stabilization though treacherous means.

Missed Opportunities
What could have been done, drawing lessons from MNREGA, was launching Urban Employment Guarantee through Act passed in State Assembly for absorption of youth in productive activities and services based on resource mapping and skill-mapping at the Municipality level. If the purpose was politicisation for success only in electoral politics, vote-bank is guaranteed at the cost of the voters and people in general.

[Bhaskar Majumder, Professor of Economics (Retd.), G. B. Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad–21101]