Dimapur, August 27 (MExN): Home Minister Imkong L Imchen today exhorted college students to cultivate dignity of labour and to replace ‘idleness and laziness’ with sincerity and seriousness in their everyday life. He said truly educated persons cannot be unemployed.
Speaking as the chief guest of the 14th biennial general conference of the All Nagaland College Students’ Union, the Home Minister criticized the so-called educated unemployed people in the state and said that when a person is educated then there is no reason why he should be unemployed.
He narrated an incident when some ‘educated unemployed’ people (union members) visited him in 2007. He asked them whether they are really “educated unemployed” and they said “yes”. However, he said, there is no reason why an educated person should be unemployed; if a person is educated and unemployed then perhaps that person is not properly educated.’ Imchen lamented the fact that the Naga people do not want to engage in manual labour but consider such works as ‘prestigiously degrading’ for them.
Pointing out that there are many roads, shops and buildings under construction in the state, Imchen said that if the so-called educated unemployed youths engage themselves in such work then there would be no unemployment problem in the state, instead the state would run short of manpower. He maintained that the two words “idleness” and “laziness” should be removed from the minds of the people. They must be replaced with sincerity and seriousness, he said. If a person is sincere in what he does then there is no room for failure, Imchen reminded. Besides, he also asked the students to imbibe dignity of labour.
“Let us think small and do it. Let us not commit the heaven and earth; let us not commit the sun and stars, but let us decide what we can do in the spirit of dignity of labour,” the Home minister challenged. Also speaking on the theme of the conference, Imchen strongly lamented the educational system in the state. There are some fundamental errors in the academic curriculum of the schools and colleges, he said.
The Home minister, who was also the education minister in the previous DAN government, said that the present academic curriculum lacks “job-oriented” subjects. Saying that the word ‘job’ does not imply only government jobs but employment, Imkong asserted that the syllabus in the curriculum is not oriented for jobs. What the schools are following is simply a generalised set of syllabus which utterly fails to make a student specialised in certain fields. The present curriculum simply makes the Nagas ‘jack of all trades, but master of none,’ he said.
The minister urged the students’ bodies to speak out their minds – “without agitating” – to the government so that some changes can be brought about in the academic curriculum. That way, he said, the educational system in the state can improve as education is the only tool for self-reliance.
