Biggest challenge India facing today is giving jobs to youths: Rahul Gandhi

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday showed his concerns over the issue of rising unemployment in India and termed it to be the biggest challenge before the country.

Addressing a gathering at Times Square here, he, who is on a two-week US trip, said, "Today the entire focus is on 50-60 really large companies. The biggest challenge India facing today is giving jobs to 30,000 youngsters, who are coming everyday to search jobs. But out of 30,000, only 450 get the job. This is the biggest challenge before our country."

Gandhi said that this challenge can be addressed by building a unified approach.

"India simply cannot be able to give a vision, if it it is unable to give job to youngsters. The Congress party has a vision to solve this problem," he added.

Further addressing the gathering Gandhi spoke about agriculture, terming it to be a strategic asset of our country.

"Agriculture can simply not be ignored. Agriculture is a strategic asset of our country. We need to build agriculture, we need to develop cold chain, we need to put food processing plants near farms and we need to empower Indian agriculture," he said.

Gandhi also spoke about India's opportunity in the healthcare sector and said, "Healthcare is going to transform. There is a huge opportunity for India to be world's healthcare centre, we have to plan for it. I am not only talking about health tourism, I am talking about constructing a system, whereby in the future, large parts of medical processes are carried out in our country."

"Our IITs are excellent institutions, but they are not networks. If we connect our IITs to our industry, businesses across the world, they will start to compete with the best institutions in the world," he added.