The Education To Employment Pipeline In India: Why The Bridges Built So Far Do Not Reach The Other Side
Arun, MVN University, Aurangabad, Haryana
ABSTRACT
India now produces more employable graduates than it did a decade ago on almost every measure the government and industry track, and this paper takes that improvement seriously rather than treating it as noise to be explained away. National graduate employability, as measured by the Wheebox India Skills Report, has risen from roughly a third of graduates a decade ago to just over half today. The paper's argument is that this aggregate improvement conceals a much more uneven and, in one respect, genuinely counterintuitive picture underneath it: employability gains have concentrated almost entirely in general higher education, particularly computer science, engineering, and management, while the vocational and technical tracks that Indian policy has spent a decade building specifically to close the education to employment gap, namely Industrial Training Institutes and polytechnic diplomas, report employability rates less than half the national average and, on the polytechnic side, less than a third. This is not the result the last ten years of policy design predicted. The paper traces why, working through the fragmented institutional architecture that governs apprenticeship and vocational training in India, in which two separate ministries run two separate apprenticeship schemes under the same amended statute, in which apprentices are defined by section eighteen of the Apprentices Act, 1961 to be trainees rather than employees and so fall outside most labour protections, and in which the National Education Policy's own vocational integration target has been tracked mainly through projections rather than verified outcomes. It examines the Prime Minister's Internship Scheme, launched in 2024, as the most recent and most heavily funded attempt to build a different kind of bridge, and asks what would actually need to change, institutionally rather than rhetorically, for that bridge to hold more weight than the ones built before it.
