The Directorate of Employment and Training (DET) better known among job seekers in Gujarat as the Employment Exchange, has gone online. It plans to put its entire database on the net, which can be browsed and updated by the applicants themselves. But with government jobs becoming a remote possibility and corporate employers not preferring government recruitment, the jobseekers say they have merely been promoted from the dusty files to the more attractive web. But the Director of DET, Raj Kumar has worked hard to get the work on the path to progress. He undertook the task of making his department net savvy although he knows the real task of the DET, that of finding jobs, is hard to accomplish.

This precisely means that the Employment Exchanges will no longer be the hub of empty stomachs and no more early morning queues to fill the forms. Now they can visit www.talimrojgar.org at their leisure and register themselves. The site developed with the help of National Informatics Centre (NIC) will also be the hunting ground for prospective employers.

But major chunks of employment generated through these exchanges are for Group ‘D’ jobs. Central and state government establishments who fill up these jobs are, unfortunately, not yet hooked to the net and therefore manual transactions are likely to continue for a long time. In due course of time, the website will have a database of more than 10 lakh of job seekers. Twenty percent of these are likely to have been employed while waiting for summons from the Exchange. At the moment, Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad applicants, numbering about three lakh have been put uo on the site. Through the site, the jobseekers will be able to know their employment status and search for vacancies depending upon their qualifications.
Though Raj Kumar is optimistic of the utilities that the site may generate, it remains to be seen how the job seekers benefit in actual terms.