Jammu & Kashmir does not lack educated or highly qualified youth. What it lacks is a serious policy ecosystem designed to help them convert education into livelihoods. Behind every unemployed engineer, MBA, postgraduate, or diploma holder is usually a family sacrifice. Parents sell land, exhaust savings, borrow money, or spend decades cutting household expenses so their children can study. In many Kashmiri families, education is not merely an academic pursuit—it is the family’s biggest investment and its greatest hope for dignity, stability, and upward mobility. Most of these families are not business-backed families with inherited wealth or commercial networks. They are middle-class and lower-middle-class households that believed education was the safest path toward a secure future. 

That belief is now weakening. Every year, thousands of graduates emerge from colleges and universities across Jammu & Kashmir. Yet industries remain limited, private-sector opportunities remain weak, and government jobs continue to be seen as the only stable option. Recruitment notifications attract massive applicant pools where engineers and postgraduates compete even for basic clerical posts. The issue is no longer just unemployment. The deeper crisis is the absence of a structured pathway through which educated youth can build sustainable livelihoods independently. 

Governments routinely announce startup schemes, employment packages, industrial policies, and entrepreneurship missions. But most of these initiatives remain generic. They fail to recognize that educated and highly qualified youth........

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