New Delhi, Apr 28: Vice President M. Hamid Ansari on Tuesday acknowledged an immediate need to undertake the challenge of providing gainful employment to millions of youth, who are in need of it.

Addressing the ''JRD Tata Young Entrepreneurs Awards'' at the Conference on ''Entrepreneurship - A Solution to Youth Unemployment'' organised by Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust, here today, Ansari said: "We need to comprehend the dimensions of the problem of youth unemployment."

Ansari pointed out that the Planning Commission''s Working Group on Labour Force and Employment Projections for the Eleventh Plan, in its report in September, had predicted that in the ten years from 2007 to 2017 there would be 93 million new entrants to the labour force.

Recommending entrepreneurship to solve the problem of such a huge influx of labour, he said, "This challenge can be better met by diversifying the sources of employment in innovative ways. One of these is to encourage the young people to become entrepreneurs and start more micro enterprises in rural and non-rural areas and run them successfully."

Ansari further opined that entrepreneurship can be nurtured only through broad-based and multiple sources of sustenance. Civil society organisations and industry bodies play a major role in it, he said.

Concerned over the condition of under-privileged, minority and marginalised communities, who according to him continue to face the "glass ceiling of entrepreneurship", the Vice President said that the problem needs to be overcome through impersonal affiliations of the type that prevails in many developed countries and has, in fact, taken shape in relation to our premier technical and management institutes. (ANI)