Unemployment rate among the youth in Kerala is huge and there is a need to make the state more attractive for its younger generation to prevent them from going outside for jobs, Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor said on Monday, January 2, 2023.

Tharoor, speaking at the inauguration of the 146th Mannam Jayanthi celebration at the Nair Service Society (NSS) headquarters at Perunna in Changanassery, said the unemployment rate among the youth in Kerala was 40 per cent in June 2022, as stated in a report by PTI.

Mannam Jayanthi is held to celebrate the birth anniversary of NSS Founder and social reformer, Mannath Padmanabhan. He said only Jammu and Kashmir was in such a situation, but that was due to militancy problems there. "No other state is showing such concerning figures of unemployment among the youth. In other states, those uneducated or unskilled are the ones lacking jobs. However, in Kerala, everyone is literate, educated and has passed Class X, yet a lot of them do not have jobs," the Thiruvananthapuram MP said.

Tharoor said 3.5 lakh professional and technical job-seekers, including 9,000 medical graduates, were registered as job seekers in the Southern state's employment exchange. Of the 3.5 lakh job seekers, around 71 per cent have ITI certificates, he added.

"This is the state of affairs in Kerala. Therefore, there is no doubt that the state needs to open its doors to bring in more investment. We need to create more employment opportunities," he said. The MP said that many youngsters are opting to go outside the state for job opportunities and that should be seen as a loss for Kerala. "We must make Kerala more attractive for our young people," was a solution he offered, as stated in the PTI report.