Towards a better Manipur

Leimapokpam Gandhi *

Phase-I of Information Technology Park being constructed at Mantripukhri as seen in January 2014 :: Pix - TSE

Our state Manipur has a massive educated and talented but yet unemployed youth strength. It's a pain to see that so many educated and talented and deserving youths are without a job. Mentality of seeking only government jobs makes our situation even worse. We cannot give government jobs to all of them.

Even if we do, question is what do we get? Our State government will borrow money from central government to pay their salaries and central government in return will borrow more money from other parts of the world. Our economy will simply get worsen. This is not a viable solution to our problem. Yes, we all know that we have to tackle poverty and unemployment the two root problems we have. We have not produced anything, just buying and buying and consuming and consuming other's products in our whole life.

We even buy jobs with money, seems like buying from others has become a habit for us. That's exactly where we went wrong. We solely depend on central government for our basic needs. We have to be able to remove that dependency if we want to grow. Lack of inflow of income and unemployment are the root cause of many problems in our state. We should just stop looking at other people for a solution to our problem. Forget about getting solution no one will even listen and try to know our problem. We should find a way to come out of our own miseries.

When we buy a Samsung mobile, how many of us try to realize that our hard earned money is going to Korea? Each time we buy a Samsung mobile, Korea is getting richer and we are simply getting poorer by the same margin. I'm not telling anyone to stop buying Samsung product but just trying to bring up an idea what would have been if we were producing Samsung mobile and Koreans were buying them from us. In our state people are very craze about IAS, Engineers and Doctors.

Parents want their children to be one of them and only one of them. Yes, we need civil service officers, Engineers and Doctors but at this very moment what we need more is businessman, industrialists and company founders. Let's make our own products and sale them to the rest of the world. We will be no more poor and any more unemployed.

It's a humble request to our people specially parents to encourage their talented sons and daughters to become businessman, industrialist and company founder. Imagine your son and your daughter not only earns a good living for your family but also able to help other people earn their family's living. It will be good if state government also brings up some good state policies.

Make our state business friendly and investor friendly zone. Bring more and more investors for our youths who have willingness to start their companies but do not have much capital, create good state policies to help them. A better Manipur is a just a step away, let's be more careful this time. It's good to see some people has already started business and they are not only earning a good living for themselves but also providing ample employment opportunities for our people.

Hats off to them and their caliber, they simply deserve what they have achieved. Your contribution to our state is plausible, your are leading us towards a better Manipur with your impeccable journey. I think it's just a turning point for our state. There will be many more to follow in the near future. We are one step closer to our goal. We have heard so many success stories from around the globe it's time we write our own and tell to the rest of the world.

If we are trying to establish a company in our state we will have to face many problems. Electricity problem, we don't get much electricity. Infrastructure problem, we don't have good road and railway connection to good market places of the country. Though having these problems we should not lose heart. Remember, there's always a way around to every problem. We can create companies of agriculture, electronics and many other types.

One sort of company domain that will suit our state is Information technology. Companies dealing in software products and services are called software companies. Software companies are categorized into Product based and Service based. Product based software companies create their own software products and they charge their clients for using their software product. One good example is Microsoft, it has its software product windows and it charged clients for using it by making them buy license of it.

Service based software companies are those who provide software related service to clients. It can create software for its client and client will simply pay for that. Good thing about the Software Company is that we need only computers and internet to do our business. We can get business from across the globe through internet. The fun part is we can create software and sell it anywhere in the world without physically travelling there. There's lot of money in information technology industry.

A software engineer working in an average service based software company has billing of more than rupees 3 lacks per month from the project owner organization. See how much profit the software company is getting by just employing a single software engineer. You can imagine how much revenue company might be generating with so many employees.

Creating software is also not so difficult task, some even say that a person can learn to create software with less effort than the efforts a person need to learn carpentry. If you found any problem then there will come many online intelligent tech guys to help you out. We should welcome IT industry in the state and do everything to keep it in our state.

It's something which can create ample employments for our youth and tremendous inflow of income towards state. State government should make better company favored state policies. They should encourage youths to take up entrepreneurship path and make them find less trouble doing so. We have great pool of educated and talented youths.

Our youths are so much talented, they will learn anything in the quickest time. I'm pretty sure about it. Let's stop giving them already caught fish as it will last for a single meal only. Instead we should teach them how to catch fish so that they can catch their fish every day and this will make sure they don't see any starving day for their family.