India has spent billions on skilling. Where are the jobs?

By Vikas Gupta 

India loves the photograph of a certificate ceremony. A minister on a stage. A banner bearing the word “skill.” Young people holding folders that promise a future. It is a reassuring image because it tells us the problem has a manageable answer: train the young, make them job-ready, and work will follow.

The results of the country's flagship skilling programme should end that comfort. The PMKVY dashboard showed 2.85 million people trained under its current phase by late August 2026. It recorded 200,224 placements. That is about seven per cent, or one person placed for every fourteen trained. The programme now follows employment after certification rather than directly tracking placement, so comparisons with earlier phases need care. Yet the earlier numbers do not rescue the story. Parliament answers put placement at about 17.7 per cent overall in 2023, while a later figure of 43 per cent applied across the first three phases. Every version leaves most trainees without a job through the scheme.

This is not a minor administrative shortfall. It exposes a category error at the centre of the jobs debate. Training can improve a particular person's chances in a crowded market. It can help one applicant move ahead of another. It cannot add a single chair to a room that has too few chairs. When the number of decent jobs is smaller than the number of people seeking them, making everyone more polished merely produces a better-qualified queue.

India adds roughly seven to twelve million people to its working-age population each year. Formal, salaried and secure jobs are created at a fraction of that scale. The shortage then rolls forward. Last year's unsuccessful applicants remain in the queue while a fresh cohort arrives. Against that arithmetic, announcements made in lakhs sound impressive only until they are divided by the annual inflow.

The evidence from vocational training makes the point even more sharply. NITI Aayog's 2023 report on industrial training institutes recorded extreme state examples: two placements from 7,634 pass-outs in Himachal Pradesh and two from 3,137 in Odisha. These are not national averages. They are warnings from the system's own evidence about what happens when training is divorced from actual demand for labour.

None of this makes skill worthless. That conclusion would be as careless as the slogan it replaces. A real ability that customers pay for can change an individual's life. Writing, selling, skilled trades, software, design and technical work can compound over time. But the relevant test is not whether a course offers a certificate. It is whether a learner emerges able to produce something a customer can already be seen paying for.

Government, colleges and employers also have to stop hiding behind the word “employability.” Employers cannot complain that graduates lack experience while refusing to invest in entry-level training. Colleges cannot sell a degree as a ticket to salaried work and then return students to the market with a lecture on attitude. Public schemes should be judged by durable employment and earnings, not enrolments, certificates or inaugural photographs.

The question for every skilling announcement is therefore simple: how many decent jobs exist at the other end, and how many trainees reached them? Until that question becomes routine, India will keep measuring the readiness of its young while avoiding the failure to create enough work for them.

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Vikas Gupta is a policy commentator and rights advocate, and an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad. This article draws on 'WTF Is Employability: The Biggest Lie Told to Young India', his book on India's jobs crisis and the pressure placed on its young. X: @guptavrv