Assam’s BJP-led government has fulfilled its promise of providing one lakh jobs to unemployed persons in different state government departments and organizations within the first two years of its installation. Another significant aspect is that the entire exercise has been by and large fair, with not a single complaint of nepotism or favouritism. It is also a fact that a large majority of the selected candidates are from the weaker and poorer sections. Decades of anomalies and irregularities in recruitment to state government jobs, which had reached their nadir with the APSC scandal, had led to a situation where genuine and qualified unemployed youth had almost lost faith in the system. But while it is appreciable that state government recruitments have become a reality and sowed seeds of hope for the future, what also needs to be focused on is the large number of recruitments taking place in various central sector organisations and departments, including the defence services and security forces. Every time there is recruitment in the railways, there is a general hullabaloo that the major chunk of jobs have been taken away by “outside” candidates. The same applies to vacancies occurring in the banking sector. While it is a fact that the percentage of “local” candidates getting recruited to central sector organisations within the region is very low, there has been very little effort on the part of the state government and other organisations to identify the root cause of the situation. A systematic fact-based ground-level reality check will probably reveal that while the majority of educated unemployed youth in Assam are not interested in applying for central sector jobs, there is also a lack of any serious effort to motivate the jobless “locals” to eye those sectors. Institutions like Gauhati University, OKD Institute of Social Change & Development, and bodies like the State-Level Advisory Committee for Students & Youth Welfare can probably conduct studies to find out the actual reasons behind the poor participation of “local” candidates in the all-India and central sector recruitments, as well as the poor performance of the few who actually target such jobs. Following this, a well-drawn campaign is required to create an environment and motivate the “local” youth right from the high school level to set eyes on central sector and all-India recruitments.