What India still needs beyond skilling schemes
The government deserves credit for thinking at scale. Crores of apprenticeship placements. Mass AI user training. Drone pilot certification programs reaching into small towns. These are genuine achievements, and they matter. A country cannot create jobs for people who are not equipped to hold them.
But training is not the same as employment. A young person who completes an apprenticeship, learns to prompt an AI tool, or gets certified to fly a drone still needs somewhere to put that skill to work.
Skilling without absorption does not reduce unemployment. It just produces a more capable pool of people who are unemployed or underemployed. That gap, between how many people we are equipping and how many jobs actually exist for them to walk into, is the part of the problem the big schemes do not solve on their own.
What the government’s own numbers say
NITI Aayog‘s August 2026 report, “Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat@2047,” makes the scale of the problem hard to argue with.
Only about 8.25 percent of India’s graduates end up in jobs that match what they studied, a figure the report draws from the Economic Survey 2024-25. That does not mean the rest are unemployed. It means the overwhelming majority are doing something other than what their degree prepared them for, often well below their qualification.
The same report puts a number on the more alarming part of the picture: close to 8.7 crore young people between the ages of 15 and 29 are not in education, employment, or training. Someone who is unemployed is at least looking for work. Someone who is neither studying, working, nor training is at risk of falling out of the economy altogether.
NITI Aayog is right to call this a conversion problem rather than an education problem.
India converts children into students well enough. It does not reliably convert students into employable people, and it does not reliably convert employable people into employed people.
The report’s own five-point reform agenda, starting vocational exposure in school, remaking college around industry, mainstreaming apprenticeships, skills-first hiring, and lifelong reskilling, addresses the first conversion: turning people into someone employable.
It has almost nothing to say about the second: making sure there is some real place for them to be employed.
That second conversion, the demand side, is what this article is about.
What this is about, what it is not
It is worth being direct about what this approach is not trying to do. Creating lots of government jobs, or high-paying jobs matched precisely to people’s qualifications, at the scale India needs, is not realistic through this route, and probably not through any single route.
The government’s other initiatives aimed at higher-paying, qualification-matched employment should continue in their own tracks; nothing here argues against them. This article’s target is narrower, and for that reason more achievable: in my assessment, more than 80 percent of the problem is solved once one crore reasonably paying jobs are created. The harder remaining tail, high-skill, high-pay employment at scale, is a separate task for separate tools.
What India needs: one crore real jobs at the bottom of the pyramid
Apart from the skilling schemes, India needs at least one crore additional new jobs because skills were built to be useful.
The arithmetic is simple once you frame it correctly. If India identifies and executes about 1,000 self-sustaining projects, each employing 10,000 people on average once operational, that are at least one crore new jobs.
Not one crore jobs created, dependent on a subsidy renewal every year. Jobs attached to projects that stand on their own economic feet: they produce something people need, sell it, and pay wages out of real revenue, not out of a scheme budget.
Projects, self-sustaining, not government funded/ subsidised
This is a deliberately different starting question from most job creation policies.
The usual question is “how do we create jobs?”
The right question is “what useful things does India need built, grown, or run, that would create jobs as a byproduct of being useful.”
A biogas distribution network in a cluster of villages is not a jobs scheme. It is a fuel access project that happens to employ people to build, install, and service it. That distinction matters, because self-sustaining projects survive elections, budget cuts, and changes in political priority. Subsidised job schemes usually do not.
It also matters because of who India’s workforce actually is. Close to 58 percent of India’s labour force is self-employed, not on anyone’s payroll, with regular salaried workers making up a little over a fifth and casual labour making up about a fifth more. A jobs plan built only around formal hiring targets is designed for a minority of Indian workers. Self-sustaining projects, sized and structured around genuine local demand, can absorb both kinds of employment: direct hires on the payroll of the project, and self-employed people, suppliers, and small operators who build a livelihood around it. That is a closer match to how most of India earns a living than any scheme aimed purely at formal job counts.
Two projects I propose below show how 4 lakh new jobs can be created on their own. This is exactly the point: the average holds even when individual projects run well above it.
Four lakh jobs, on the table today
Two of these self-sustaining projects can already be sized with real numbers.
A national network of modern packaged biogas systems, replacing LPG in rural areas at zero operating cost, can put an estimated 3 lakh rural youth to work building, installing, and servicing the systems.[1]
Turning India Post into a rural e-commerce and last-mile retail platform for local producers can create over 1 lakh 3-year trained sales agent positions, most of whom will be experienced enough afterward to move into permanent sales roles or start ventures of their own.[2]
Both involve hands-on, local, physical work that AI proliferation is unlikely to displace.
That is 4 lakh jobs from two project ideas, from one person. If a single contributor can identify projects worth 4 lakh jobs, it is not a stretch to expect that thousands of engineers, entrepreneurs, policy planners and domain experts across the country, if invited to submit proposals and properly evaluated, can collectively come up with the remaining 96 lakh, if not more.
My additional suggestions, categorised below, are not sized with numbers, because doing so without real costing would be guesswork. Each has a clear, direct or indirect path to job creation, and each is exactly the kind of category an open submission process should be inviting detailed proposals for, rather than having the number and shape of the opportunity guessed at from outside.
Rural manufacturing and circular economy
An “Incubate India” network: Standardising waste-to-wealth MSMEs across every district: temple flower waste turned into incense, recycled textile fibre, packaged biogas units and cow dung converted to bio-fertiliser, creating direct manufacturing jobs and indirect jobs in collection, distribution, and retail.[3]
Agriculture and allied: A vegetable and millets cooperative built around cold chains and shifted farming practices, creating direct, continuous, year-round employment in farming, packaging, processing, and distribution, and indirect employment in transport and retail.[4]
Agriculture, export-linked: Expanding Indian smart-farming investment into Africa, creating direct jobs for Indian agricultural experts, supervisors, and managers, and indirect jobs through domestic input exports, machinery production, and services.[5]
Manufacturing and MSME: Relocating energy-crippled European MSME factories to India, temporarily or permanently, creating direct industrial employment and indirect jobs through technician upskilling and sustained manufacturing partnerships.[6]
Entrepreneurship and self-employment: Encouraging and training one spouse in every nuclear family toward entrepreneurship or trading, creating direct self-employment and indirect job creation as these small ventures grow and begin hiring.[7]
Tourism, hospitality, and heritage: Executing heritage trails, eco-hubs, and coastal tourism zones through a business-oriented PPP model, creating direct employment on-site and indirect, multi-sector employment across hospitality, transport, and retail.[8][9]
Water and sanitation: Leasing stagnant sewage ponds to private developers for creating STPs free of cost, in return for reclaiming the wasted land, creating jobs in STP installation, operations and maintenance, and residential/ commercial construction.[10]
This is a first cut, not the full list of the many suggestions I have given among the 250 of my articles published in PGurus.
It is enough to make one thing clear: the categories exist, they span sectors most Indians work in, and finding more of them is a matter of asking the right people, not waiting for one department to think of everything.
Who should decide which projects get built
This is where the current system gets in its own way.
Today, project selection inside government runs almost entirely through IAS officers: which schemes get funded, which pilots get greenlit, which proposals reach a minister’s desk. This is not because IAS officers lack ability. It is because the civil service is built, trained, and rewarded for something else: administration, coordination, procedural soundness, and delivery within rules.
Those are exactly the skills India needs to execute one thousand projects well. They are not the same skills needed to spot which one thousand projects are worth executing in the first place. That judgment is more often found in people who have built, run, or worked inside a business in the relevant sector.
Project selection should not be the exclusive preserve of any one profession, however capable. It should draw on whoever is closest to the ground truth of a sector: farmers, manufacturers, technologists, healthcare operators, logistics veterans, and ordinary citizens. Because only they can see the gap. Because they live inside it.
A practical structure for this:
- Open submission: Any citizen, entrepreneur, cooperative, or institution can submit a project proposal with basic details: what it does, who it employs, how it pays for itself, and what it needs from the government to start.
- AI first-pass screening: Use AI to filter submissions for basic viability, duplication, and completeness before any human time is spent on them. The screening prompt should be tuned to shortlist promising submissions, not reject on strict scrutiny. A good but incomplete idea, or an idea good in parts, or an idea poorly written by a first-time submitter is worth a panel’s time, not an algorithm’s rejection. This removes the bottleneck that keeps good proposals buried and lets reviewers spend their time only on serious candidates.
- Expert panel evaluation: A panel of relevant sector/ industry experts does the actual evaluation and selection of each proposal. So a farm-based project is judged by people who understand farming economics. A manufacturing project by people who have run a factory floor.
- Two criteria are worth weighting: preference for projects whose jobs are resistant to AI displacement, since a jobs plan that gets automated away within a few years defeats its own purpose; and preference for projects that need little or no government funding to start, since these launch fastest and survive budget cycles best.
- IAS officers for implementation: Once a project is selected, the administrative machinery of the civil service is exactly what is needed to move it from paper to operation: land, permissions, funding disbursal, inter-department coordination, and accountability.
This is not a demotion for the civil service. It is a better division of labour. Selecting which one thousand ideas are worth building and executing them well are two different skills, and India needs both done properly, by the people best equipped for each. - Focus on Jobs, Not Revenue Generation: Government’s role in most of these projects should be facilitator, not partner-in-revenue. Execution should default to PPP, private, or cooperative models, with direct government investment kept minimal. Where a project could plausibly pay government back over time, the temptation to extract that value upfront, through fees, revenue share, or heavy conditions, should be resisted. If the government tries to profit early, it will find fewer investors willing to start. Indirect income, through jobs, taxes, and downstream economic activity, follows project success on its own; it should not be treated as a precondition for approving one. The same principle holds where foreign direct investment is involved, tempered only by genuine national security considerations in sensitive sectors.
The real target
One crore is not a slogan number. It is what the scale of India’s unemployment and underemployment problem actually requires, and it is achievable only if the country stops treating job creation as a single big scheme and starts treating it as a thousand smaller, self-sustaining bets, each one built because it is useful, and each one open to whoever has the best idea for it, not just to whoever happens to be sitting in the chair that approves it.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
References:
[1] A major but simple Atmanirbharta Project suggestion – Feb 4, 2022, PGurus.com
[2] Transforming India Post into a Rural E-Commerce Powerhouse – Mar 20, 2025, PGurus.com
[3] Incubate India: Building a Productive Fortress Before AI Outpaces Employment – Feb 21, 2026, PGurus.com
[4] A Common Pill for Health-Agro-Water-Fiscal Illness? – Nov 13, 2025, PGurus.com
[5] Extend smart farming strategies to Africa through Indian entrepreneurs – Aug 17, 2022, PGurus.com
[6] How An Indian Proposal Can Help Europe’s Factories To Survive – Jan 11, 2026, PGurus.com
[7] An Entrepreneur in every family – May 16, 2017, PGurus.com
[8] Can India Do Well in the Tourism Sector to Increase Jobs and GDP? – Dec 21, 2024, PGurus.com
[9] Creating History-Themed Tourism Spots across India – Apr 19, 2017, PGurus.com
[10] How Govt Can Treat Untreated Sewage At Zero Cost – Aug 30, 2026, PGurus.com
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