This year, there is a certain panic in the Indian boardrooms and campus placement cells and it's not about job scarcity. Employers state the situation is different, too: There are lots of jobs available and not enough job seekers. About 2.3 crore jobs remain unfilled and most of the companies trying to fill vacancies for freshers say that they are not finding candidates ready for the position. Employability, measured by the Graduate Skill Index (GSI), which is monitored on an annual basis by industry groups, fell as low as 42.6 per cent in 2024 but has since improved. The employability score in India has improved to 56.35 percent in 2026 from 54.81 percent in 2025 and 46.2 percent in 2022, according to the India Skills Report 2026. That's real progress. But if you look at what drives it, computer science and IT engineers are at 80 and 78 percent employability due to the growth of AI, data analytics and automation jobs, while MBA graduates have actually dropped down to 72.76 percent from 78 percent, with ITI and polytechnic graduates languishing at around 46 and 33 percent respectively, the streams that were supposed to man the factories of the country. A large, young work force is being created that is digitally literate, but a significant percentage of this pool is still unable to enter a job market and be productive.

It's not a funding story but it is part of a funding story. The National Education Policy, which has been in force for six years this year, had envisaged 6 per cent of GDP to be spent on education. In reality, spending has been around half that. The centrepiece of the policy's regulatory changes, which were supposed to merge half a dozen overlapping councils under one high education regulator, was taken up in Parliament, referred to a committee and then quietly dropped when the earlier Lok Sabha was dissolved, but has not been brought back since. Meanwhile, the new national research funding body, established by an Act of Parliament, has got off and running, approving more than a thousand projects on an expenditure of tens of thousands of crores. So it's not all a failure of policy. It is part of a system which can create new institutions if there is political will, but it has a hard time tackling the more human question under all the structural reform: what is school supposed to actually produce?

This is a very basic question to ask, especially in today's era of a national skilling mission, but the answer provided over the past few decades a mark sheet, a rank, a placement letter is what is currently failing the employers and families. It is interesting to note that India had a working definition of 'employability' long before it was one that anyone measured and it was not as restrictive as the one formulated in the recent past. It was wider. That older tradition did not have a teaching-student relationship based on the transfer of information. It assumed that a person might be very educated, but unfit to be trusted with power, wealth or responsibility; it constructed the whole of the education system on the basis of closing that gap, that is, communal chores, physical discipline, self-restraint, apprenticeship in a craft, debate with the teacher, with silent obedience to him. A pupil was sent in the world with instructions to be true and to perform his duty, not to be successful. If a kid was successful, it was believed that his or her character would mirror the success.

That's a topic I'd like to bring back to not as a "nostalgia" but because of what the data is telling me. The numbers improving the quickest are among those associated with hard technical skills outcomes, like coding, data, and automation, where the outcomes are measurable, and curricula are clearly being changed. The numbers that are falling or stuck are part of streams that have a higher value on judgment, communication, adaptability and integrity than a syllabus could easily measure: management, vocational trades, the professions where a graduate faces trust with ambiguity instead of a fixed problem set. India's labour market statistics are catching up with the old picture, which suggests that it is not the opposite. The nation now has a significant share of the world's AI talent and its gig and freelance workforce is set to multiply nearly by two by the end of the decade, giving more Indians than ever before the opportunity to work without a manager to peer over their shoulders and making self-discipline and self-direction a form of economic goodwill rather than a moral nicety. If you simply train a man to pass an exam, he isn't very well equipped to work in that world. It is easier to build a workforce that has some knowledge of self-examination.

Abandoning technical rigour is moot here, and never in the older tradition was it moot: mathematics, statecraft, medicine and astronomy found no difficulty living with ethics and self-study; the older tradition never saw these two as competitors. Money and power were never disapproved but have to exist under a system of self-control and responsibility. It's a pretty contemporary notion for an nation that is seeking to gain productivity from its growing population without bringing in the hyperstress, corruption, and vengeancefulness of other nations that've been racing to catch up. The lesson for Indian schools and colleges and for the Indian policymakers still debating who is going to regulate higher education is that simply revering an ancient system wholesale isn't a good idea. It's worth remembering that the civilization that constructed it already knew this, and the placement data now makes it coldly and statistically clear that a country seeking to have better professionals must have better human beings first, and knowledge without character does not scale.