AGARTALA, June 9 (TIWN): Newly appointed Finance Minister of Tripura Bhanulal Saha on Monday urged the Union Cabinet to consider realistic condition in the Northeastern states on board while formulating the coming Union Budget and announce a package to improve employment generation.Addressing the pre-budget conference of Finance Ministers at New Delhi on the day, Finance Minister Saha said, “Private sector is almost non-existent in the Northeast and the State has to shoulder much of the burden of education and healthcare to name a few. Lack of employment opportunities would give rise to serious social unrest”.

While public service opportunities were shrinked by the day since an announcement from the Finance Ministry for freezing employment opportunities across the country with an extent of waiver for NE states, the High Court of Tripura recently cancelled 10,323 jobs of Graduate, Under Graduate and Post Graduate Teachers – one of the biggest government recruitment process in the state in recent times.

“Large numbers of educated young persons are waiting to be employed while the opportunities in government sector is decreasing due to policies of the Government of India and advocacy of the 13^th Finance Commission”,  Saha said. He urged urged for a ‘re-look for reversal of policies’.

The minister called on the new central government to build a set of incentives to attract both domestic and foreign investment in the Northeast to ensure that the region came up to he common standard with other industrially developed states.

On a different context, Finance Minister Saha today urged for extension of 100 days wage employment through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MG NREGS).

“The Government of India may also provode for 150 days of wage employment to the rural people under MG NREGA. Daily wage under the scheme may be indexed to inflation”, he said. Saha reiterated the previous proposal of running a similar poverty alleviation scheme for guaranteed wage employment to the urban poor. Tripura was the lone state across India to have started its own urban poverty alleviation scheme – the Tripura Urban Employment Programme (TUEP) in 2009.