This refers to “Privatise employment exchanges” (June 25) by Shyamal Majumdar. No doubt government-run employment agencies have become inefficient for their customers and costly to the government. However, any scheme to revamp these should not lose sight of their distinguishing characteristic — they provide free service to employers and easy accessibility to job seekers from remote corners of the country.
Their Achilles’ heel, however, is the delay in services provided by them because of bureaucratic mindset. But privatising them will deprive many underprivileged candidates of a free service.
An alternative solution is to restructure these as autonomous organisations, modernise their candidate-accessing mechanism and provide them with manpower motivated by performance-based incentives. The economy will gain from adding human capital in this way.
Y G Chouksey, Pune