It was the summer of 2025. The advertisements about the Narendra Modi government’s new internship scheme were splashed across newspapers, TV channels and social media. Like lakhs of others, P Adarsh*, 22, noticed them from his hometown Bhilai in Chhattisgarh. After finishing his degree in agricultural engineering a while ago, Adarsh was hunting for an internship that could sharpen his skills, pay some money, and still leave him evenings to prepare for a bank job exam. 

So he applied through the Prime Minister’s Internship Scheme (PMIS) portal that was advertised, specifying his preferences, and got an email saying he had been selected for an internship. It was at a PSU, Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), in state capital Raipur.

But he didn’t take it.

Instead, he travelled to Anantpur in Andhra Pradesh, to the Southern Region Farm Machinery Training and Testing Institute, for an internship he had been selected for through the National Apprenticeship Training Scheme (NATS). “At the time, I was desperate and applied for multiple internships,” Adarsh says, candidly, on a phone call. Joining the BPCL internship would have meant commuting 60 km daily and the money for that would have to come out of the Rs 5,000 that was to be his monthly stipend under PMIS. In contrast, Anantpur meant a free bed at the government institute hostel, and the only major expense would be Rs 3,000 on food but the Rs 12,300 stipend would easily cover that. It was also in a domain connected to what he had studied, unlike the PMIS internship which was in a completely unrelated field. His experience may sound like a cautionary tale but it’s far from an exception. 

The Prime Minister’s Internship Scheme was read as the Modi government’s answer to the jobs anger of 2024. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced it in the first budget after the Lok Sabha results with a target that made big headlines: internships for 1 crore youth in 500 top companies in five years, 30 lakh of them in the first two. But two years on, the distance between those numbers and the ones the government actually reports looks too vast to bridge.

Responses to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, which runs the scheme, show that till April 30, 2026, companies posted 2.97 lakh internship opportunities – nearly a tenth of the two-year target. The picture gets more bleak. These opportunities shrunk to 1.73 lakh actual offers. About 18,000 of those given these offers showed up for work. Only around 5,200 stayed to the end. This is all against a total of 12 lakh applications sent via PMIS. 

The money reflects the same underwhelming reality. Of the Rs 63,000 crore initially announced for the PMIS over five years, Rs 123.7 crore, or less than 0.2 percent of the total, has actually been spent until March 15, 2026 – nearly two financial years into the scheme. Of this sliver, the government spent Rs 46.7 crore on marketing and advertising, a sum that’s just a few crores less than the Rs 54.3 crore it has actually spent on paying the interns. The remainder went towards other costs that the records do not clearly break down.

Why has a scheme tasked with solving a real problem, and armed with the resources to solve it failed to find enough takers? 

The RTI responses, combined with data presented in Parliament, interviews with former interns, companies, economists and others, reveal a scheme falling far short of its promise for a host of reasons, some of which have been documented by the government’s own evaluators. Along the way, it raises the question of announcing ambitious targets without a clear pathway to get there. 

PMIS was announced on July 23, 2024 in the budget of the re-elected National Democratic Alliance government. “Our government will launch a comprehensive scheme for providing internship opportunities in 500 top companies to 1 crore youth in five years. They will gain exposure for 12 months to real-life business environment, varied professions and employment opportunities,” Nirmala Sitharaman had said in her budget speech. It was one of five schemes announced that day for youth skilling and employment, with a total outlay of Rs 2 lakh crore. 

The NDA government had been sworn in for a third consecutive term but the BJP’s  seat tally had shrunk to 240 from 303. The party had courted first-time voters and the youth hard and multiple surveys had pointed out that employment was top of mind for this section. The newspaper coverage the morning after the budget took note that the government had blinked. One editorial remarked that the budget “was more about coming to terms with the compulsion of coalition politics and calming frayed sentiments over jobs than about big ideas or bold reforms”.

India has been struggling with how to generate enough jobs for its vast number of youth – estimated at 367 million in the age group of 15- to 29 years – for years. Of this, the 263 million who are not pursuing education make up the potential workforce. 

Over the years, education levels have increased considerably, with the country now churning out 5 million graduates annually. But graduate unemployment has remained high, reaching close to 40 percent among 15- to 25-year-olds, according to the State of Working India 2026 report by Azim Premji University. Of the 5 million graduates, only about 2.8 million annually are able to find jobs, a trend that’s held since 2004-05. Of this, an even smaller share is able to secure stable, salaried jobs within a year of graduating, the report points out. 

In 2023, close to 70 percent of the unemployed youth in the country, or about 11 million, were graduates, up from 44 percent in 2011. In May, the unemployment rate for those between 15 and 29 years stood at 15.9 percent, nearly thrice the unemployment rate for those aged 15 years and above (5.5 percent), according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey. 

This is the crisis that finds expression in protests over botched recruitment exams, lakhs of youngsters queuing up for a few thousand vacancies and most recently, is considered by analysts to be a factor in the rise of the Cockroach Janta Party. 

At the other end of the spectrum sit complaints by India Inc, about the lack of employability of graduates. Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy had claimed in 2018 that 80 percent of Indian youngsters “are not trained suitably for any job”. Fellow IT stalwart CP Gurnani of Tech Mahindra had said 94 percent of engineering graduates are not fit to be hired. More recently, the India Skills Report estimated that just over half the graduates in India were employable, an improvement from a third a decade ago but still a large share. 

It was to plug this gap “between academic learning and industry demands”........

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