gadhinagar the gujarat government plan to have a quickfix solution for making the computerstarved state literate in a field so far neglected till quite recently has gone phut worked out by then employment commissioner s jagdeeshan and announced by chief minister keshubhai patel with great fanfare as a mass programme unprecedented in scale and dimensions anywhere in india about 18 months ago the cm has now been told that the two lakh persons sought to be trained in 200001 in a twomoth training have failed to become computerfriendly let alone develop a skill for making them usefully employed after finding the plan not really helping those for whom it was meant the cm has decided to put it off said a bureaucrat which means that the ambitious project to make 10 lakh unemployed youths computer savvy in five years has been dropped the decision for this was taken say officials at a recent meeting the cm had with the labour and employment department officials in which their minister of state bhupendra lakhawala was also present what is the use of the programme if it does not make youth employable he asked the entire rs 30 crore spent last year has gone down the drain added a bureaucrat a study commissioned to the tata consultancy services currently in the final stages of preparation says that of the two lakh registered only 149 lakh were the actual trainees for the twomonth computerfamiliarisation course the rest were all ghost students worse a mere 90000 appeared in the examinations at the end of the two months and out of them only 70000 passed out in terms of ability the students just did not learn any skills which would make them to go in for a quick employment in an area still finding a place in the state the cm had no other go he decided to put a brake on the whole thing an official said admitting that there was problem lakhawala told the times of india as many as 21 private reputed computer agencies were asked to run the programme however instead of running the programme themselves at select indian technological institute iti centres in the city for which money was provided by the state government the agencies chose to appoint several franchaisees which ran the programme without any skill the agencies would just keep a percentage for themselves and get away we decided to drop the franchise system and revive the programme insiders said the main problem was political the state commionerate of employment would be pressed by smalltime politicians mainly of the bjp brand to open ever new computer training centres with government money computer classes mushroomed those who ran them provided as less as rs 1000 per month to the teachers pocketing a lot of government subsidy amount said a secretariat source instead of the planned 200 as many as 550 such classes came up the franchaisees would often further lease out for a sum to some others interestingly the