Ten thousand crore rupees sounds like the budget of a medium sized government infrastructure project. It is not. It is really about the hidden cost of civil servants processing welfare claims, engineers running power plants, bank officers behind PSU counters, who have been asked to work within systems that changed faster than their training could keep up with. Put a number on that gap and it stops sounding abstract fairly quickly.
Consider broadly the scale at which India is already spending on skilling. Earlier this year, the Union Cabinet approved the continuation and restructuring of the Skill India Programme, an outlay of 8,800 crore rupees dedicated to building a more employable workforce nationally. That is a serious commitment, and it says something important, that the government already treats skilling as worth funding at a scale most private organisations could never approach on their own. What it does not do, notably, is ring fence anything close to that amount specifically for the millions of people already inside government and public sector jobs today. The money is largely aimed at bringing new entrants into the workforce ready to contribute, not at closing the gap for those already at their desks, running the systems that exist right now.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A young graduate entering the workforce this year will likely have grown up assuming digital tools are simply how work happens. A large share of India’s public sector and existing PSU workforce did not have that assumption built in. They learned a job, then watched the job change right before their eyes, often without anyone rebuilding their training to match. Visualise that gap across the sheer size of India’s central government, state government, and PSU workforce combined, which adds up to several crore people, and a figure approximating ten thousand crore rupees to effectively close it starts to look less like an exaggeration and more like a conservative estimate.
Also Read: From Compliance to Capability: Upskilling the Public Sector Workforce for the Digital Era
Throwing money at the problem will not fix it – and this is worth calling out plainly. Even a well-funded push can be wasted entirely if it simply buys more generic online courses that are merely a tick in the box and don’t make much of a difference in the employees’ efficiency or productivity. The workforce crisis here is not a shortage of training content, of which there is plenty. It is a shortage of targeted training customised for a specific role in a specific department, delivered with appropriate timelines and support that inculcates skills and builds genuine confidence in people rather than awards a token certificate.
What would fixing this by 2027, a genuinely tight timeline, actually require? Three things stand out. First, a proper mapping of roles to the competencies each one truly needs here and now, not the competencies that mattered a decade ago, so that funding goes toward what people actually do all day rather than a generic syllabus applied uniformly. Second, budgets for reskilling the existing workforce need to be separated from budgets aimed at preparing new entrants, since folding both into one number tends to leave the harder, more expensive problem, that of retraining people mid-career, chronically underfunded. Third, and perhaps hardest, success needs to be measured by whether skills actually show up in the job, not by how many courses got completed, since a completion certificate and genuine capability are not the same achievement.
None of this is a criticism of the ambition already shown. It is an argument for precision, spending real money on the right problem rather than a broadly worthy one that happens to be easier to fund. India’s public sector and its enterprises are not short on people willing to learn. What they are often short on is training built specifically for the work they already do, funded with the seriousness that number implies.
Ten thousand crore rupees is a number large enough to fix this properly, provided it goes toward the people already doing the job, not just the ones about to start it. Getting that right by 2027 is still possible. Getting it right at all requires deciding, now, that the workforce already inside the system deserves the same investment as the one still on its way in.
Views expressed by: Ashissh Kaul, Director – Knowledge & Advisory and Business Head (PSE), SHRM India