PRAJYOT MAINKAR
Five years and counting, India’s education overhaul is producing more graduates than ever – just not the kind the job market wants. Here is an uncomfortable fact that no education ministry press release will lead with: in India today, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be unemployed.
The ILO’s India Employment Report 2024 put the jobless rate for graduates at 29.1% – almost nine times higher than the 3.4% unemployment rate among those with no schooling whatsoever. According to a study by Azim Premji University, nearly 42.3% of graduates under 25 are unemployed. The India Skills Report 2024 found that only 51.25% of final-year students tested were skilled enough to be hired.
India is, in other words, spending enormous sums of money and political capital to produce graduates who are increasingly unemployable. And the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, now five years into its rollout, was supposed to fix
exactly this.
A reform with the
right diagnosis
To be fair to the NEP, it correctly identified the disease. Indian higher education has spent decades rewarding memorisation over application, producing the majority of graduates fluent in exam technique but unprepared for a job interview. The policy’s response was ambitious: scrap the rigid 10+2 structure, introduce a four-year undergraduate degree with multiple entry and exit points, and embed vocational Skill Enhancement Courses directly into every degree programme.
Five years on, the implementation tells a different story. The target has been missed. What has happened instead, in colleges from Nagpur to Patna to Kozhikode, is a nationwide drift toward the easiest available credit.
Across hundreds of institutions, students are choosing low-intensity vocational electives – wellness, creative writing, political leadership, over technically demanding ones like data analytics or financial modelling. Not out of disinterest, but out of cold calculation. IThis isn’t laziness. It’s rational behaviour in a broken incentive structure.
What actually
changed since 2020
The Ministry of Education has not been idle. In December 2024, the no-detention policy – long criticised for advancing students without learning- was abolished. Students in Classes 5 and 8 must now pass year-end examinations. From the 2025-26 session, Class 10 and 12 board exams can be taken twice a year, reducing the single-exam pressure that has shaped Indian education for generations. But only a handful of states have implemented it thus far, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Haryana, to name a few.
The Malaviya Mission Teacher Training Programme has trained over 2.5 lakh faculty members in areas including AI and cybersecurity. The teacher count in schools crossed one crore for the first time in 2024-25.
These are real gains. But they sit alongside equally real problems that remain unresolved.
Only 34% of faculty members feel adequately trained to deliver NEP-compliant courses, according to a UGC survey. The policy mandates that all higher education institutions offer vocational courses – yet hundreds of colleges lack functional computer labs, licensed software, or reliable broadband. The infrastructure for teaching Python doesn’t exist in the same institutions where students are theoretically being asked to choose it. Colleges offering yoga or creative writing need a room. Colleges offering data science need investment. The market of least resistance is not created by students – it is created by underfunding.
India has pledged 6% of its GDP for education since the Kothari Commission recommended it in 1964. The actual figure today sits below 3.5%. The NEP repeated the 6% commitment. The Budget has not been followed.
A reform that isn’t the same everywhere
One of the NEP’s most structurally difficult features is that education sits on the Concurrent List – shared between the Centre and the states. The result is a patchwork rollout, meaning the same policy produces wildly different outcomes depending on where a student was born.
Karnataka was the first state to implement the NEP in August 2021, then partially reversed course when a new government arrived in 2025. Kerala only joined the PM SHRI school-upgrade scheme linked to NEP compliance in October 2025. Chhattisgarh confirmed implementation in July 2024. Each state moving at its own pace, with its own resources and its own politics, means that two students graduating in the same year with nominally the same degree may have received very different educations.
The digital divide sharpens this further. Roughly one in three rural households has reliable internet access. The NEP’s flexible, credit-banking architecture-the Academic Bank of Credits and the SWAYAM online learning platform, now used by over one lakh students – assumes connectivity that millions of students simply do not have. Flexibility, for a first-generation college student registering electives on a shared phone with patchy Wi-Fi, is largely theoretical.
Grabbing policymakers’ attention
India has 235 million school-going children and a median age of under 30 (29.2 years to be specific, as per recent 2026 data). The working-age population continues to grow, and this trend will persist through the 2030s.
Its working-age population is growing and will continue to do so through the 2030s. The demographic dividend everyone talks about is not self-executing; it requires those young people to emerge from education with skills the economy can actually use.
Right now, that is not happening at anything close to the required scale. India’s skill gap is estimated at 30-40% of the workforce, per the ILO Employment Report 2024. Young people make up 83% of the country’s unemployed. The proportion of educated youth among the jobless has nearly doubled since 2000. The NEP’s direction is right. The four-year degree, the credit-banking system, and the vocational integration – these are the correct structural moves. But a framework sitting on top of underfunded institutions, undertrained faculty, and misaligned incentives will not close a 30-40% skill gap. It will just give that gap a new name.
The next five years of the NEP matter more than the first five. The window to get this right is real. So, critically, is the window to waste it entirely.
