By Pravesh Dudani
In 2022, young Indians filed 42.8 lakh applications for apprenticeships under the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme. In 2025, they filed a little over 4 lakhs. Close to 77 lakh apprenticeship vacancies have been created since the scheme began, and more than 70 lakhs are still available.
The seats exist. The applicants have walked away.
For a decade we have called India’s skills problem a supply problem. That is now half right at best. A stipend of ten to twelve thousand rupees, minus rent in an industrial town, minus the real risk that no job waits at the end, loses cleanly to a delivery job that pays this week. That is not youth impatience. It is a badly designed bargain, and we designed it.
The window is not 2047
The comfortable story is that the world is ageing, India is young, and time is on our side. United Nations projections put India’s working-age share at its peak within three to four years. The dividend is not a fund we can keep drawing on until 2047. It begins narrowing during the working life of the student who walked into a college classroom this July.
AI is not taking away jobs. It is taking away the first job.
For thirty years the path was forgiving. Get a degree, join a large employer, learn the actual job on the employer’s rupee. Testing, basic coding, documentation, first-draft analysis: modest value, enormous learning. It was an apprenticeship industry paid for without ever calling it one.
That rung is being sawn off. Entry-level roles in Indian IT have contracted by an estimated 20 to 25 per cent as AI absorbs exactly those tasks. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39 per cent of core skills will be transformed or made obsolete between 2025 and 2030. Hold that against a four-year degree. For the first time in our educational history, the shelf life of a skill is shorter than the qualification meant to certify it.
We are measuring the wrong thing
Higher education enrolment has reached a record 4.5 crore. Gross Enrolment Ratio has climbed to 30 from 23.7 a decade ago. These are real achievements. Now read the other column. Graduate unemployment stands at about 11 per cent, more than three times the national average. And the finding we rarely say aloud: in India, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be unemployed.
GER counts how many young Indians we let in. It says nothing about what they can do on the way out. Around 4 per cent of Indians aged 15 to 59 have formal vocational training. Germany is near 75 per cent, Japan 80, South Korea 96.
India does not have a skills gap. It has a status gap.
A family that takes quiet pride in a nephew who is an unemployed MBA will feel quiet embarrassment about a daughter who is a certified diagnostic technician earning more than he does. That sentence explains more of our skilling failure than any budget line. NITI Aayog records that more than 74 per cent of establishments registered under the apprenticeship scheme were inactive in an average year. None of that needs a policy change. All of it needs somebody to move first.
What has to be true by 2031
Universities must shift the unit of accountability from enrolment to outcome, voluntarily, before it is imposed on us. Publish what graduates are doing twelve months after they leave. Not a placement percentage. Role, sector, earnings, retention. An institution that flinches at that disclosure has told you what it knows about itself.
Work-integrated learning must stop being a pilot and become the default. A degree with a credited, waged apprenticeship inside it solves the arithmetic problem and the status problem at once. Assessment must become independent of instruction; third-party validation is what makes a German certificate portable. Industry must face what its efficiency has done: in automating the entry-level task, it abolished the training system it never knew it was running. You cannot hire experienced people if nobody is willing to train the inexperienced.
The world will not wait
By 2030 the global economy is projected to be short more than 85 million skilled workers. India is the only major economy expected to hold a surplus. But a surplus of people is not a supply of workers. No country imports demographics. They import certified competence. Japan is targeting up to 820,000 skilled workers by 2029. Those pipelines are being wired shut this decade, and once a country becomes the default supplier of nurses or welders to an ageing economy, that position is hard to take back.
I run a university built on this belief, so my bias is on the record. But this is an argument about a clock, not a category of institution.
India’s demographic dividend is not a fact about our country. It is a decision, and the window for making it is about five years wide. We will not feel the cost in a data release. We will feel it in a living room around 2035, when a family that did everything it was told to do, school, college, the loan, the degree, discovers there was never a first job at the end of it. That family will not ask what the policy was. They will ask what the rest of us were doing in 2026.
The article is written by By Pravesh Dudani, Founder and Chancellor of Medhavi Skills University.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETEducation does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETEducation will not be responsible for any damage caused to any person or organisation directly or indirectly.
