(This is the latest edition of the Political Line newsletter curated by Varghese K. George. The Political Line newsletter is India’s political landscape explained every week. You can subscribe here to get the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.)
Have you experienced or heard of a situation in which a car repair involving changing a sensor that costs Rs. 600 may take three days? One gets to hear of such experiences due to a lack of adequate trained workers. It is real, and it is happening as there are not enough skilled workers in the auto industry for manufacturing and maintenance.
One may find it difficult to believe, but it is true that in India, there are companies that find it difficult to find workers or are caught with bad workers. Meanwhile, an estimated 8.7 crore Indian youth aged 15 to 29 are not studying, working, or receiving training, a recent Niti Aayog report said. Meanwhile, companies that have jobs to offer are finding it difficult to find skilled workers. It is largely true for many sectors—if you ever needed to find a good physiotherapist or a dentist, you would know how difficult it can get.
Electric vehicles are a growing sector, and they can be a good job creator for the country. But, lo and behold, the thousands of jobs do not have suitors in this industry.
The Hindu Businessline reported this week that “61% of auto-component makers face manpower shortages as the EV transition fuels demand for new-age skills in batteries, software, and electronics.”
Matching jobs to jobseekers is one part of the problem, but the underlying problem is the education and skilling ecosystem of the country. The Skill India Mission and the National Skill Development Corporation have trained over 6 crore Indians through diverse skilling, apprenticeship, and mobility programs over the past decade, but there is evidently something amiss. The Hindu reported last year that the real challenge is not just employment but also employability. It reports that there is an increasing number of graduates, but not all are employable.
According to CII, only “42.6%-46% of graduates can be considered employable by industry standards, despite millions entering the workforce annually.” Thus, in such a scenario, the college curriculum needs to be brought into consonance with job market needs.
While available jobs cannot find good candidates on the one hand, the larger problem is also the scale. When we hear of a lakh or two lakh jobs being created, it might sound very impressive, but compare that with the reality of a million job seekers entering the market every month! So it is a problem of both quantity and quality—availability of jobs is limited; availability of skills is ever more limited.
Think of the teacher, the driver, the plumber, and the electrician that you know. Are they skilled enough that you feel confident in them? Raghuram Rajan, the economist and former Governor of RBI, stresses the value of moderate value-added jobs rather than high-skilled jobs. He finds that these areas, such as plumbing and repair work, require a modicum of skill and are where jobs are potentially possible to create. The quality of employment in manufacturing also remains a matter of discussion. Here is an excerpt from an interview Mr. Rajan gave to The Hindu Frontline:
Q) A young woman, Keerthika, who works for an Apple supplier, told Bloomberg this month: “I make Rs. 18,000 a month, and send most of it to my old parents in the village. I don’t know what I would have done without this job.” Apple’s suppliers in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have created more than 2,00,000 factory jobs. In a report, Azim Premji University found that between 2022 and 2024, 38 million women fell back into self-employment in agriculture, where wages have stagnated. Can pockets of industrialisation across the country help these women move from farm to factory?
Rajan: I am not against manufacturing; let’s get as many jobs as we can, wherever. But think for a second. 2,00,000 jobs? That’s a pimple on the dimple of India’s jobs requirement. It is minuscule. You just said 38 million women returned to self-employment in agriculture. That’s why we keep saying that the female labour force participation has increased. And we are still trying to understand why the share of these self-employed women has gone up.
Federalism Tract: Notes on diversity
Language of Justice
This week, the Tamil Nadu State Assembly unanimously passed a resolution urging the central government to make Tamil the principal language of the Madras High Court. According to the resolution, Article 348(2) of the Indian Constitution provides a mechanism by which this can be ensured by the Governor of the State, with the consent of the President of India.
On this point, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Tamil parties may be on the same page—Shah has been a votary of the promotion of court proceedings in local languages. In 2022, the Home Minister urged people to overcome an inferiority complex about their languages and wholeheartedly accept them. He requested developing dictionaries of local languages and making their use wider so that in the future they can be adopted as the language of the court and law.
Mining States Sense Trouble
The Biju Janata Dal (BJD) alleged that Odisha’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs compromised state interests by supporting the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2026, which potentially deprives the state of almost 1 lakh crore INR in arrears. Recent changes in mining regulation restrict the authority of States to independently levy fresh taxes, cess, or duties on mineral rights and mineral-bearing lands, and increased the control of the Centre in all.