Opinion: PM Modi Is Building A Future-Ready New India

Most economies facing the AI transition are now assembling their equivalent under pressure, while India is in a position to use what it already has

Eleven years ago today, on World Youth Skills Day, the Skill India Mission was launched into a country that had plenty of workers and very little in the way of a system to prepare them. Vocational training sat scattered across ministries, employers hired on instinct, and a certificate meant whatever the issuing institute wanted it to mean. The scale of the youth population was described endlessly as a dividend, but nobody had built the machinery to collect it.

That machinery now exists, and the numbers it produces are substantial. More than 1.64 crore candidates have been trained under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana since 2015, and over 54.41 lakh apprentices have been engaged since 2016. The ITI network has grown from 9,776 institutes in 2014 to 14,688 today. India’s rank at WorldSkills improved from 29th in 2015 to 13th in 2024. What these figures record is a policy that treated human capital as infrastructure and invested in it, rather than letting it rot in the backpages welfare.

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And that reframing is among the most consequential domestic decisions of Prime Minister Modi’s tenure.

From schemes to a system

The early years of Skill India were about volume. The current phase is about architecture, and the difference is best understood through the Skill India Digital Hub, launched in September 2023. It folded five disconnected portals, covering PMKVY, NAPS, DDU-GKY, Jan Shikshan Sansthan and PM Vishwakarma, into a single Aadhaar-linked account that carries training records, NCVET-aligned certification and DigiLocker-stored credentials.

Over 1.5 crore individuals have registered, with more than 1,000 courses running in 23 languages. This is unglamorous work, but it is precisely that which decides whether........

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