India has become very good at counting the people it trains. The harder question is what happens to them after the certificate is handed over.Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people in rural India go through government skilling programmes and come out with a trade, and sometimes a job or a loan. Two schemes do most of this work: the Rural Self Employment Training Institutes (RSETI), which train people for self-employment, and the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY), which trains rural youth for wage employment.The government can tell us how many people were trained. It can tell us how many were placed, or marked as “settled.” What is harder to find is a more useful number: how many of them are still earning a living from that training a year later.

That is the missing link in India’s rural skilling story.Take RSETIs — the scheme I know best, from my work with a bank on rural self-employment. As of March 2026, there were 632 RSETIs across 619 districts. Since 2009, 60.63 lakh candidates have been trained, 43.89 lakh have been counted as settled, and 22.52 lakh have received bank finance.On paper, that looks like a success: nearly 72% of those trained have been counted as settled. But sitting right next to that figure is a quieter one — only about 37% of everyone trained has actually received bank finance.

That gap matters because RSETI training was never meant to end with a certificate. It is meant to help a person turn a skill into a purposeful livelihood. A woman who learns tailoring for weeks but cannot buy a sewing machine has gained a skill, not a business. A young man trained in mobile repair who cannot arrange money for tools has finished a course, not started any venture or a local business.

The government’s own evaluation of RSETIs makes the problem plain. The study covered 60 institutes and 4,565 trainees from batches trained between 2017 and 2022. It found that fewer than a quarter of trainees had actually received credit-linkage support, against a scheme target of 50%. Lack of funds was one of the biggest reasons trainees gave for remaining unemployed, and many said they were unhappy with the banking........

© Greater Kashmir