Inaugurating the Global Partnership Summit here, Sharma said that the world is faced with the challenge of unemployment, given the fact that out of the global labour force of 3.3 billion, 200 million people are unemployed and over the next decade, around 400 million people would enter the labour market.

“Countries like India will see 250 million additional job seekers in the next 15 years as they shift from the rural economy towards urban industrial activity. There is a serious challenge for policy makers to provide enough jobs in the manufacturing and services industry to absorb these people and to impart adequate skill sets to make them employable,’’ the minister said at the CII event.

He said that setting up of national investment and manufacturing zones (NMIZ) will not only increase the share of manufacturing in the GDP from the current 16 per cent to 25 per cent, it will also generate employment for 100 million people by 2025.

UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, speaking during the occasion, said that though effected by the global recession, India has been more resilient than developed economies due to strong domestic demand and to achieve sustainable growth. He said, “We need partnerships with all in the society….while large industries provide momentum to growth, we need to focus on the manufacturing sector…. which can provide alternative employment and remove regional imbalance”.

Wooing the global investors to invest in the state, Yadav said that it plans to bring a fundamental change in the economic structure and has worked out a slew of measures. “We will create an enabling policy regime to attract investment and a facilitating bureaucracy to help industry,” he said.