Skilling India For A Future-Ready Workforce: An Urgent Call To Policymakers

The sobering truth is that fewer than five per cent of India’s workforce has received formal vocational training — a glaring contrast to China’s 25 per cent and the more than 50 per cent in advanced economies.

If left unaddressed, this skill gap will cripple India’s ability to compete in global value chains, jeopardise its innovation ecosystem, and erode its claim as a hub of human capital. The urgency is compounded by automation, artificial intelligence, and the green transition—all of which would displace millions of traditional jobs by 2030. The world is racing forward, while India risks being left behind.

How Others Do It

Other nations have already rewritten the playbook, offering lessons that India can no longer afford to ignore. China has embedded skilling into its industrial strategy, tying vocational institutes directly to manufacturing hubs and ensuring that skills training keeps pace with market demand.

Germany’s dual-track system has shown how classroom instruction combined with structured apprenticeships can produce job-ready graduates and sustain one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the world.

Singapore, meanwhile, has invested heavily in lifelong learning through its SkillsFuture initiative, enabling hundreds of thousands to reskill annually via digital platforms and modular credits. Even the United States, despite minimal federal involvement, has created thriving ecosystems of private sector-led digital academies and globally recognised certifications.

Skill exporters such as the Philippines and Indonesia have gone a step further by tailoring vocational certifications to the demands of international labour markets and, thereby, boosting overseas employment and remittance inflows. These varied strategies underline a simple truth: nations that take skills seriously secure their place in the global order.

Why India Is Struggling

India, by contrast, continues to struggle with deep structural weaknesses. Governance is scattered across multiple ministries and agencies, leading to duplication, inefficiency, and inconsistent standards. Vocational training institutes remain poorly equipped and are staffed by instructors who often lack exposure to new technologies, rendering them incapable of preparing students for a rapidly evolving workplace. The much-needed collaboration between industry and academia remains superficial; as a result, fewer than half of India’s graduates are employable in the fields for which they have been trained.

Stark regional and gender disparities persist: southern states outpace the north in opportunities, and women make up less than one-fifth of vocational trainees. Worse still, the system is overwhelmingly degree-centric, with little space for lifelong learning or mid-career reskilling.

Cultural stigma attached to vocational training compounds these problems, leaving technical and skill-based streams under-enrolled and undervalued.

The case for urgency could not be clearer.

By 2035, the global demand for skilled workers would reach unprecedented levels. Nations that align education, vocational training, and industry requirements will capture enormous economic gains, while those that lag will consign their youth to unemployment and irrelevance. India cannot afford complacency.

Failure to act decisively would not only forfeit economic opportunity but also risk social instability, as millions of young people find themselves excluded from meaningful employment. Conversely, appropriate policy interventions could add as much as two trillion dollars to the economy by 2035 and cement India’s place as the world’s leading supplier of skilled human capital.

Integrated Approach Needed

For India to seize this moment, its policymakers must initiate five interlinked shifts in both mindset and practice. First, the country must move from fragmented initiatives to a unified and integrated national skills grid—a digital platform that uses real-time labor market intelligence to eliminate duplication and guide policy in accordance with demand.

Secondly, the culture of classroom-only training must give way to mandatory experiential apprenticeships. Unless young people spend significant time embedded in real workplaces, no amount of theoretical training will suffice. This requires fiscal incentives for employers who take apprentices seriously, but the long-term payoff in employability is immense.

Thirdly, India must end its obsession with degrees and embrace modular, stackable credentials. Skills should be recognised, stored, and continually upgraded through a national “Skills Wallet” that allows citizens to pursue lifelong learning at their own pace and in line with market needs. Fourth, the country must orient its certification standards to global benchmarks. Only then will Indian workers remain competitive internationally and enjoy greater labor mobility in a globalised market.

Finally, the system must be radically inclusive. Skilling must be undertaken across districts in the country, and special measures must ensure that women participate in equal numbers. Support services such as childcare, combined with targeted local hubs, can dismantle the structural barriers that currently exclude large sections of the population.

Such a transformation cannot be treated as a routine policy intervention. It requires a national mission, led at the highest level of political authority. A National Skills Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, with deep and formalised industry participation, is essential to ensure coherence and alignment with broader economic and trade strategies.

Funding Improvements

Funding, too, must be scaled up extensively. The current spend of a mere 0.05 percent of GDP is highly inadequate for the purpose, and should be raised tenfold to at least 0.5 percent, drawing not only on government budgets but also corporate social responsibility initiatives and international partnerships. Timelines must be sharp and non-negotiable: pilot the digital grid in ten states by 2025, enforce dual apprenticeships by 2026, modernise at least half of the Industrial Training Institutes by 2028, roll out Skills Wallets nationwide by 2030, and achieve near-total alignment of Indian certifications with global standards by 2032.

These milestones are ambitious but essential. Without them, the vision of India as a global skills hub by 2035 will remain a pipe dream.

Accountability must be equally rigorous. Success should be measured by hard indicators: placement rates within six months of training, the number of apprenticeships created, the share of women enrolled, and the level of digital integration in training institutes. Unless these metrics are tracked transparently and reported publicly, the system will lapse into the familiar trap of lofty announcements and poor delivery.

India’s young population is both a promise and a peril. The choice before us is stark. Either India seizes this moment to create a workforce that is flexible, inclusive, and globally competitive—or it risks condemning millions to obsolescence. In the twentieth century, nations that mastered industry led the world. In the twenty-first, it will be nations that master skills. If India wishes to remain at the cutting edge of global talent, we must act now—decisively, ambitiously, and without delay.

(The writer, a commentator, is a former Indian diplomat who has served as High Commissioner to Canada, Ambassador to Japan & Sudan. Views are personal)